project aldeia [EN]

The land is owned by an integral cooperative, Almaohana, crl. (Cooperative) It is foreseen that the land will be held in trust, in perpetuity, and internally allocated into lease shares. Anyone joining the project will buy at least one share in the cooperative.

Each shareholder will be a member of the integral cooperative. Each share owned by a shareholder guarantees one home site, whether rustic or planned. Any improvements by shareholders remain the property of shareholders.

A collective value can be determined and allocated to a certain number of shares in the cooperative. Each share will contribute paying off the debt for the entire property, plus a fund for future improvements, infrastructure, machinery, etc. (perhaps around 10,000 EUR or so per household).

In principle, the Project would be accessible to a wide diversity of people, regardless of financial ability. The project aims to attract a high percentage of Portuguese (local and otherwise), young people, as well as people from elsewhere who have been in Southwest Alentejo for some time.

Decision-making will operate at different scales simultaneously. Each household will participate in neighborhood scale decision-making. Each neighborhood will make decisions for the development and maintenance of its land and infrastructure as needed, so long as it fits well within the aliveness imperative, which is always at play, although it will manifest in various ways over time, depending on ecological conditions. Project guardians, along with neighborhood representative(s), will make decisions that affect the village as a whole. The decision-making process will be based on a modified form of sociocracy.

The Project will be an ecosocial experiment in self-organization at various scales: personal, household, neighborhood, village. The Project's land will be organized by "neighborhoods" according to perceivable ecological wholes: valleys or water basins.

Each neighborhood group will self-organize to inhabit and care for an ecological whole. The regenerative development of the land will be the responsibility of each neighborhood and its inhabitants.

Each neighborhood group will commit to an ongoing co-design process to ensure the continued ecological integrity of the neighborhood's ecosystem. The process will be a collective sensing to study the carrying capacity of each ecosystem, the potential for its further regeneration, and how it might be best inhabited (optimal quantity of housing sites and potential neighborhood projects).

Community will be intentional at the neighborhood scale. On a larger scale can unfold organically, in whatever forms are willed by those inhabiting the Project. What will form the connective tissue of the community is an imperative for ever greater aliveness.

Those stewarding the project will serve to be guardians of the patterns of aliveness of the land, ecologically and socially. This translates into the notion that our mode of living, and everything we do, will bring an ever greater degree of aliveness at every scale, each one of us, our neighborhoods, the village, and the surrounding lifeshed we are intimately nested in, and the surrounding bioregion.

This imperative will be clearly stated before the sale of lease shares. Prospective participants will have the choice to opt in. Once agreed to, these imperatives will be in effect for all and will affect what can be developed over time in each neighborhood. It is the responsibility of each neighborhood to live into and be guardians of their neighborhoods as ecological wholes.

The Project intends to provide an alternative to "business-as-usual" way to inhabit land together. This promises to manifest in several ways.

The initial process for Project Aldeia to secure the above parcel(s) of land is twofold: