Caring for the Land and Territorio as a Method for Participatory Design

Rural communities in Europe that defend land-based practices and livelihoods face pressures to modernize in ways that reproduce a nature‒culture dualism. Design methods informed by Latin American ontologies seek to help communities identify and resist capitalist enclosure, make visible and legitimize local ways of knowing and traditions, and foster learning processes toward autonomy. Here, we report on our experiences in land-oriented, community-led participatory design, making material, communal artifacts in Italy and Spain. The artifacts range from animal stables to bee apiaries. We examine the artifacts and their makings through a lens of territorio (territory) to demonstrate a different land-based reality that resists colonial oppression. In these realities, communities are not mere observers of the changes around them, but they make their own present through the making of artifacts. These relational design methods supporting planetary co-habitability require care-full community-led engagement with the land.