VEGALT STORIES

LOCATION VEGALT, BJÄREHALVÖN

STUDIO KTH

YEAR 2022

STATUS MASTER THESIS

AWARDS HONORABLE MENTION

It is not the physical distance between the city and the countryside that matters on the Bjäre Peninsula; life unfolds around the fields. Instead, it is the lack of connection to them. Until just a few years ago, farmers employed young people during the summers. However, the industry has been revised; the seasons have been extended, work has intensified, and the availability of labor has changed. Lacking experience working with the landscape inevitably leads to a lack of understanding of it.

 

Just like the climate, cultural heritage can serve as a unifying concept through which we are offered new ways of thinking and acting. Preserving culture and teaching about it means that more people will relate to it and practice it, which in turn means that it can evolve to meet today’s needs.

 

Vegalt Stories is intended to be an educational and research farm built in hempcrete, serving as a meeting place for the local community. To make the site an integral part of daily life and ensure its proper upkeep, the project will be run in collaboration with all municipal schools, from elementary students to Akademi Båstad’s horticultural training. By using the landscape as a classroom, the practical and cultural knowledge of the landscape will become fundamental to how we perceive our surroundings. Both old and new traditions related to the landscape can emerge.

 

The site will also function as a tool to test, develop, and evaluate new farming methods that we can rely on in the future. This could be done in collaboration with the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU). They already run several test sites across Sweden, and this would be an addition to that. Data from new farming systems will be shared both nationally and locally to reach out to established and aspiring farmers and promote sustainable solutions. The goal is not only to restore knowledge about the immediate landscape but also to move away from the idea that agriculture itself is harmful to the climate. This proposal aims, on a larger scale, to make the farmer part of the solution, not the problem.