● ▲ Seeding Sovereignty
designed with Samar Halloum for MASS. Design Group’s studio at Yale University (2022)
and written about in a piece for OASE Journal no. 122 at TU Delft (forthcoming)
This project aims to promote and foster land, water, seed and knowledge sovereignty for multi-generational farmers through participatory design models to practice designing a network of communally constructed and maintained infrastructure.
Looking at the historical and current geopolitical dynamics of agriculture in the Rio Grande watershed—our site—we proposed an extension of a community land trust that focuses on supporting the maintenance of communal knowledge exchange between aging and emerging farmers.
Situated in the basin between Magdalena & Sierra Blanca mountains, the community land trust is initiated in a site located in San Antonio. The site is representative of a typical farm faced with challenges of water and Internet access, insufficient flood management system, irregular land parcels as well as the state–wide barriers facing emerging farmers attempting to access the agricultural field—the inaccessibility of these infrastructures are by design and maintained through policy and property.
Through this enacting the participatory design model, Community Land Trust, the community can practice how to develop and steward their socio–environmental worlds. This gives the community the agency to participate in the co–developmenting and maintenance of socio–economic infrastructure, including libraries, laboratories, commerce, and telecommunications to nourish their own mutual aid network.
The community would also be provided with material manuals to construct their necessary programs. This manual begins outlining potential configurations and wall typologies, as well as the projected labour and time requirements.
Using the manual, farmers can begin planning various programs using the model as a test-bed. This autoconstruction knowledge, along with access to more self-regulated infrastructure and biotechnical knowledge, will create land, water, seed and knowledge sovereignty for multigenerational farmers.
This participatory model allows farmers to replicate potential configurations on one’s own farm.