Casa dels Futurs (“The House of the Futures”) is a project to create long-term physical and educational infrastructure to better support social and ecological movements to build solidarity and cooperation in the time of climate crisis. They are organizing around the goal of converting Barcelona’s abandoned Hospital Sant Llatzer into a permanent Climate Justice Center and Movement School to cross-pollinate social and local solutions for movements to thrive on a damaged planet. The crew is working on 3 main strands:
Climate Resilience
CdF are creating a model of large-scale infrastructure that reduces ecological impact while building climate resilience. They cultivate and share locally-relevant climate solutions that engage off-the-grid, 0-waste, and low-tech tools to allow communities, movements and ecosystems to better prepare for deepening ecological destabilization. Together with local community gardens, a social center, a co-living project and park services they collectively manage the watershed and engage in regenerative agriculture and land-management practices to improve biodiversity. The team aims to offer an inspiring example of engaging local knowledges, traditional crafts, and people-powered solutions for the Mediterranean Climate.
Build Knowledges
They are creating a permanent home for a Movement School that can cultivate social solutions that address the root causes of the climate crisis. They engage decolonial, ecofeminist and anti-racist practices with the goal of bringing together diverse movements for mutual-aid. The crew work to engage place-based pedagogies, situated knowledges, and popular education techniques to empower organizers with skills to build power and knowledges from below.
Global Solidarity
CdF are creating infrastructure to support long-term and international networked organizing for social and ecological movements. They open spaces to co-create strategies across movements while building alignment and common cause. The team lifts-up care practices that support long-term and holistic movement, activist, and ecosystem health. They acknowledge the historic responsibility of the Global North and prioritize directly impacted communities including climate and economic refugees, and at-risk environmental defenders.
The team is volunteer-led and organize horizontally around thematic issue (Global Solidarity, Climate Resilience and Knowledges) and in working groups (communication, care + gender, strategy, Administration, and Institutional Relationships). They have monthly coordination meetings and tri-monthly general assemblies convened and coordinated by a small secretariat.CdF are committed to horizontal self-organization and subscribe to the Jemez Principles for Democratic Organizing.
They are creating..
- Cartography of la Vall de CanMasdeu: A community-generated cartography that spans past, present, and future to use local and expert knowledge to promote biodiversity and build climate resilience.
- Water Systems Management and Fire Prevention: Interventions on local natural systems to capture water in the landscape, including maintenance of ancestral water systems, planting of native trees, and expansion of systems of grey-water recycling.
- Intending that by 2025, La Casa dels Futurs will be a net energy producer and 0-waste project.
- Trans-local Research Center: To gather and disseminate local knowledges and academic research that supports local social organizing and low-carbon technologies, including traditional crafts, culture and horticulture.
- Living Archive: An evolving archive to simultaneously document and share our organizing process. We engage popular education techniques and the arts to facilitate the returning of knowledge back into the communities from which they come.
- Intergenerational Exchanges: Spaces that embrace and exchange traditional knowledges as climate solutions while building multi-generational community and localized knowledge.
- Activist Conference Center: A versatile space with capacity to host meetings, gatherings and conferences for allied organizations including accommodation, meals, meeting rooms, and logistical support for gatherings of up to 40 participants. This service will be offered both free-of-charge and on a sliding pay-scale to support movements and the financial autonomy of the project.
- Observatory of Environmental Defenders: Support for initiatives by defenders and other existing organizations to investigate, report and transmit human rights and environmental violations, as well as organize awareness campaigns and conflict mapping.
- House of defenders: Expansion of existing projects to provide support and emergency housing to Environmental Defenders at risk.
- Activists-in-Residence + Artivists-in-Residence program: Multi-month exchanges for activists and artivists to promote exchange and network creation between local and international movements and to offer spaces of rest and recovery.
