Communities that grow together, stay together. Bright Rural Futures in Spain
The pandemic has increased the ability to tele-work for many and creates more opportunities for redistributing the population throughout rural areas. However, people who decide to make this change face the challenge of adapting to their new communities without compromising the needs of the existing residents in order to have long term success. To make this possible, I created Plántate Pueblo, a service that creates opportunities for new and old residents through a gardening mentor program with the goal of making lasting population changes united by past tradition and community.
Since 1975, Spain has witnessed widespread economic and migratory changes that have impacted the trajectory and distribution of the country’s population from rural zones to the country’s largest cities.
As more and more people leave the countryside, the historical rural knowledge and maintenance of the land is lost and pollution production becomes increasingly localized in distinct urban areas creating heat islands and overall increased consumption levels. The COVID-19 pandemic has opened the door for more opportunities of tele-work and the possibility for these kinds of workers to live outside of the cities. However, it is necessary to rework the urban/rural dichotomy that has been established to unite these worlds to create lasting demographic changes and healthy rural communities.
A leap of faith or an area of opportunity?
During the coronavirus pandemic, we saw for the first time in a while a decrease in population in major Spanish cities indicating more people may be open to making this change than ever.
Despite a desire to make this leap, I found tele-workers who want to root themselves in a village are faced with a barrier of how they will adapt and integrate themselves in their new community. There can be apprehension coming from both sides and current villagers can be suspicious of new residents’ intentions in the village. Successful adaption happens when new residents are incorporated with the established culture and traditions.
From my interviews with lifelong village residents, I noticed a longing for the previous way of life and a desire to have a communal interconnectedness of the past.
After talking with neo-rurals, I found there was a need to assist people with this profile to find and move to a village that can accommodate tele-work (high-speed internet). And, in order for this move to have long-term success in their adaption, it’s necessary to break down the barrier that exists between new and old residents and allow them to understand each other to create a holistic community that honors tradition.
The challenge at hand:
How can we facilitate community between new inhabitants and existing members of villages in order to increase long-term success of population distribution change in Spain?
Who is this for?
- Teleworkers with an interest in moving out of the city to a village that are apprehensive about how they can make this move and integrate themselves without any support or rural knowledge
- Villages that want to attract new residents and whose residents are interested in creating a more communal, connected community via village traditions and values
What do they need?
- Neo-rural teleworkers want to find a new home and a way to connect with their community since their work is home based. They want to adapt and integrate themselves within the scope of their new community’s values.
- Current residents miss the sense of communal support in the past and would like to have a way to share and support their neighbors while maintaining the village’s traditions.
Tradition as a tool to unite us
During my research and interview phase of the design process, I was drawn to how most all the villagers I interviewed had gardens and how important maintaining agricultural traditions is for the historical and environmental preservation of Spain’s rural areas. I also noted a great sense of personal pride gardens seemed to be for each village interviewee and how eager people were to share this knowledge with me even through a phone call. This gave me an idea on how I could break down this barrier between these two groups. Thus, Plántate Pueblo was born.
Plántate Pueblo is a service that helps tele-working would-be neo-rurals find a village and helps them integrate and adapt with a gardening mentor program that connects a new resident to a community volunteer mentor in order to cultivate their own garden while simultaneously cultivating community between these groups. Additionally, this service is to give the opportunity to share rural knowledge and increase community among current residents. At the end of a harvest season, Plántate Pueblo would host a festival among the participating villages to showcase and celebrate the produce and community that has been nurtured and attract potential new residents to make a similar change.
MVP Service Objectives Defined
- Help tele-working neo-rurals with the process of finding a new home in a collaborating village
- Give an opportunity to current villagers to share their knowledge and connect more with their community as in the past
- Connect new residents to their new community through the use of tradition to aid with their adaption to rural living
- Create lasting roots and connections in the community that make the possibility of rural living visible to more people
My hope for this service is that it goes a step beyond relocating more would-be neo-rurals to villages and reversing depopulation trends, but that it helps create a greater sense of connection to past traditions and builds trusting relationships among new and old residents for longterm success.
Designing the Business Model
Plántate Pueblo requires multiple levels of strong stakeholder relationships in order to work.
- Town Halls decide if their village meets the criteria to participate and select a trusted community spokesperson to garner participation interest among villagers
- Service facilitators work with the spokesperson to coordinate with interested villagers and put them in contact with new residents as well as make checkins
- Service support staff is essential in guiding new residents through the relocation process
- The marketing team promotes the service through local media and applies for funding opportunities
One of my main concerns with this service is maintaining motivation among users. Their interactions within the service need to be strategically coordinated so that no one feels unsupported or misdirected and can find solutions to any issues that arise quickly among the program’s management. I created a blueprint to highlight these various interactions:
How will this project get funded?
Plántate Pueblo is structured as a non-profit business and would utilize a policy-innovator funding model as its principle source of income generation. It is necessary that the service has an effective marketing and management team to apply for EU funds that have been allocated to this issue and can convince other organizations such as banks to provide backing as well.
Additionally, agricultural businesses could sponsor the gardening mentorship and in exchange receive more business and community loyalty in return.
Motivated individual donors would also be able to make one-time and recurring donations through the website.
Project Reflections
Listen to your users, they will guide you to the solution
Always listen to what the users are telling you. Pay close attention to subtleties, concerns, and make connections that create better design.
Don’t base the solution in something completely new, innovate and adapt it to current needs. Make sure that one user is not prioritized more than another and make sure the solution is something the users would be willing to do.
Create a platform for rural citizens to share their skills in the way they would like.
Main take aways
Solving depopulation will need more than one approach. There is still a lot of systemic change that needs to occur to see a large impact.
With services like Plántate Pueblo, more opportunities are made available. We have to reverse engineer the current growth model by taking advantage of technological advances while not losing the value of the past.
Dice Jaime Izquierdo:
Una aldea que solo sea gente que viva allí y turismo rural, sin que nadie cultive nada ni se atiendan las tierras y el monte, no es aldea. Es una estructura urbana.
Ethical Considerations
This service could never be successful without keeping rural voices and concerns at the forefront of design decisions. These users cannot be left behind in the process of helping another profile. There is a risk of gentrifying villages that must be kept in check always.
This service has an obligation to defend and represent the values of the villages it works with and make sure each neo-rural participant is in agreement with these values going forward.
This service solves depopulation using certain privileged workers. Could the presence of remote workers attract more business and infrastructure prioritization to rural areas?
How can we protect the economies of rural areas by placing people with telework that is presumably financially based in cities?
It’s important to consider how this service could impact the economic stability of villages for better or worse.
Closing acknowledgements
A special thanks to everyone in La Nave Nodriza for their patience and guidance in learning the design process and helping me make better design decisions each step of the way.
Also, a big thanks to my fellow classmates for inspiring me and helping on this journey.
