Name: The Possibility of an Island

Type: Thesis

Result: With Honors

Year: 2018

Organization: EAUAH

Surface (est.): 2100 m² 
Team: Alejandro

Nuevo Baztán, industrial town founded and built thanks to Juan de Goyeneche in the first part of the eighteenth century, was one of the national paradigmatic of the so called “poblados productivos”. They were cities that were built ex novo in order to stablish new industrial structures at a regional level by placing both factories and residential areas for the working class together in rural areas next to Madrid.

The productive system has drastically evolved in the recent years, with a crescent automatization of industrial activities, where human intervention is becoming more intellectual and less physical than ever. The production of sensitivities and emotions is the new main sector and production is not going to be as we knew it anymore, as material production is going to be completely detached from human bodies. We can consider then that the intellectual is the worker of the 21st century. Franco Berardi defined this new social class as the cognitarians, a new working class that does not depend on its body anymore, but on his ability to produce intellectual work out of his brain, since bodies are being substituted by robots and machinery.

Is it possible to find an island?

“The possibility of thinking and producing new sensitivities and emotions”

In this ecosystem of production and evolution we propose to take advantage of the territorial isolation as Goyeneche did to develop productive structures based on intellectual activities (that are not considered as work anymore but as leisure) that must lead to personal growth of all those people who are part of the town. A new way of understanding factories that instead of producing material assets, will produce knowledge, will produce people. A place where the most prepared cognitarians will have the opportunity to know and learn from each other, enhancing the possibility of thinking and producing new sensitivities and emotions, giving them a real alternative to their precariousness or exile situation.

“An unique community coming back to countryside”