Conference to create meeting points, create habitable territories and share cooperative experiences held in Biziola de Lazkao
Conference to create meeting points, create habitable territories and share cooperative experiences held in Biziola de Lazkao
Conference to create meeting points, create habitable territories and share cooperative experiences held in Biziola de Lazkao
The conference, which was organized by KoopFabrika, was attended by representatives from Olatukoop and Mondragon University and by Barcelona: La Ciutat Invisible member Ivan Miró, among others.
The two-day conference was opened by La Ciutat Invisible de Barcelona representative Ivan Miró. In his speech, he gave an account of the cooperative ecosystems and poles that are emerging in Catalonia. Said Miró, “local transformative development is not achieved by creating a large number of cooperatives, since they can be unconnected and in competition in the capitalist market.”
University of the Basque Country researcher Jule Goikoetxea opened the proceedings today. In her presentation, entitled Territories of the 21st century and the privatization of democracy, she suggested that there can be no popular sovereignty without institutionalized and territorialized political capacities. In Goikoetxea’s words, “territory is a consequence of an act of political territoriality.”
In addition, the participants in this conference, which is the spark for creating the Lurralde School, had the chance to analyze the challenges and opportunities of public-community governance. For this, Andoni Egia and Isabel Elizalde presented their respective experiences in Hernani Burujabe and Malerreka Common. In Egia’s words, public-community governance is the main challenge, as is being able to bring different local agents together within this planning framework so that territorial economic planning is as democratic as possible.
Additionally, the organizers took advantage of the Biziola meeting to further cultivate the Lurralde School project; the promoters saw the need to make a “quantum leap.” Arianne Kareaga, promoter of the project and Mondragon University researcher, added that “rather than individual projects, we would like to create a mechanism to promote cooperative-community ecosystems that are bound to the territory and whose focus is the individual and the community.”
Six years promoting the transformative social economy and entrepreneurship
KoopFabrika is a program that promotes the transformative social economy and social entrepreneurship, whose objective is to contribute to the implementation of professional projects and socio-economic initiatives. Since its launch in 2017, KoopFabrika has promoted dozens of projects.