Casa delle Agriculture - Agriculture and sustainable development

Luigi Coppola – the author of this case study - is part of the collective Casa delle Agriculture, a community of practice established in 2011 in Castiglione d'Otranto, in the southern Puglia (Italy). This practice has the goal to revive abandoned lands, repopulate the countryside, generate solidarity-based economies, and strengthen the bonds of the community by building a new cultural, social and economic model of living together based on natural agriculture. It is a sort of repopulation of energies and desires, ready to be put into a system for a conscious return to the land, facing on a local scale the biggest global challenges at environmental, cultural and social level. Casa delle Agriculture has started a participatory process of rethinking rural traditions, through social and economic solidarity and through the creation of a cooperative system. In this complex action of realist utopia, narration plays a fundamental role. This narrative constructs the horizon of common action and builds the bonds that hold together the people who participate in this collective adventure, which is now more than 10 years old. The continuous questioning and redefinition of language is one of the key elements in this evolutionary process.


University/Design-Architectural Studio Community project Association and Cooperative Casa delle Agriculture
Project lead
Association and social cooperative composed by a collective of farmers, activists, artists and designers.
Country/region
HGermany/Berlin, Turkey/Istanbul, France/Arles, Belgium/Hasselt.
Keywords
Restanza,  realist utopia,  rural imagination, holistic approach, cultivating the change, everchanging narrative for a social, cultural and political transformation.