UR_EU Thesprotia Embassy Session: Epirutopia

All over Europe and especially in its rural and depopulated territories, we find local communities promoting their own solutions to their needs, facing the lack of public means. It is remarkable that many rural initiatives and practices develop cohesion among communities through activities, leading to growing active knowledge networks. It is at this level and in these places where people carry the greatest potential to identify challenges; they also have almost everything needed to tackle them.

Many of these rural practices operate as common ownership collectives where “common” such as land, water, food, education, arts, crafts and technologies are commonly used, shared, preserved, protected or even produced. Such practices managed to reframe the rural identity into a contemporary notion and support civic spaces where people meet, exchange and act on their local concerns.

This parliament aims to bring together young initiatives and practices based in rural Epirus region to share their challenges and views aiming to produce collaborative, open-ended socio-political imaginaries for the region. On December 18th, during the open digital session, recorded local voices from Thesprotia regional unit and invited participants will also give responses to three main questions regarding their community:

1. What should be protected,   2. What should be introduced and  3. What should be eradicated.

Following the methodology of the “Parliaments of Urban Rights” we aim to build an open data project with various voices that can be shared which each community in physical meetings. This project acts as a call for greater appreciation of the diverse livelihood practices engaged in by rural communities.

It aspires to contribute towards a new language of the rural communities, drawing upon ecological representations of diversity, complexity, sustainability, resilience and vulnerability.