Day 4: Site visits Valencia

Activity 9: Organising for Social Change: Site Visit – Day 2

Day 4: Site visits Valencia

Activity 9: Organising for Social Change: Site Visit – Day 2

1 day

Aims 

To help us to:

  1. Get to know how one community in Valencia organises for change
  2. Continue deepening our thinking on our social change initiatives
  3. Think carefully about what it means and takes to build alternatives to existing systems that are not working for communities.

Task 1
Full group: Site Visit to Horta de Valencia

For Tekano, the main attraction for having our visit based in Valencia, is our proximity to the movement, Horta de Valencia, and the opportunity to spend time with them. Horta de Valencia has important links to South African politics and struggles over land, space, migration, environment, food sovereignty, water and climate. It will provide an opportunity to see what it looks like when communities organise and own their resources.

The original Horta of Valencia was around 20,000 hectares in the 1960s. Today, little more than a quarter of that land remains. It is currently owned and run by a collective that has over 20 years of history and we are told, incredible organizing experience in the environment and food sovereignty movement of citizens, farmers and farm workers unions.

Prior to departing, Fellows will prepare: 

  • Equipment and other resources that you may need for video recording
  • To share with spanish activists in valencia your own activism, in an interview/conversation 
  • To observe and learn carefully for purposes of remembering important detail. 
  • These are angles that we will explore while at Horta de Valencia: 
  • The historical context of la Horta
  • How communities have organised for food and food sovereignty
  • What the gains have been for the communities’ health status
  • What the cooperatives offer our SCIs as learning

Video making 

At the end of the visit, SCI groups will craft a short documentary about their visit to Valencia. Be sure to anchor your documentary, to give the audience the emerging story. The videos will form part of each SCI group’s Concept Document, that will be presented to Tekano by each SCI group.

Site Visit 6 Horta de Valencia

València, the Horta and the Albufera. València’s horta (vegetable gardens) is one of the oldest and most important irrigated urban agricultural land areas in the Mediterranean. They were created during the Middle Ages by the Arabs, who built a network of irrigation ditches that is still in use, and is a benchmark for other agricultural areas throughout the world.

Food and water are two basic strategic values for cities in the 21st century. València, with its 6,000 hectares of arable land for growing vegetables and 21,000 hectares of Albufera (freshwater lagoon), is an extremely fortunate city in this respect. But over the past 50 years the agricultural land area has been reduced by over 50% as a result of the city’s expansion, and the water in the Albufera has suffered a biological collapse from which it still has not recovered. Today, the future of València’s traditional horta and the Albufera are just as valuable as they are uncertain.

Orgull d’horta is a multi-platform documentary that portrays the threat posed by the continuous growth of the city of Valencia over the vegetable garden, the agricultural land that surrounds it. The aim of the project is to make visible the conflict over the value and use of land in this metropolitan area.

https://orgulldhorta.apuntmedia.es/en/about-the-documentary and https://lacosechaweb.com/ 

Last updated: May 2022