Translated by Louise Pain

This short essay seeks to briefly recount the story of TERRRA (Trans European Resilience Residency and Research Academy), one of the recent projects initiated by the atelier d’architecture autogérée (aaa, Studio for Self-Managed Architecture)[1] TERRRA—whose name directly signals its commitment to a planet in dire need of repair, regeneration, and reinvention (hence the three Rs)—functions as both a network and a hub. The network component consists of close friends and long-term collaborators of aaa who are located throughout Europe and beyond. These include researchers, professionals in different fields (architecture, landscape, eco-botany, and economics), artists, students, and ordinary citizens who are working on related topics and share similar values and ethics. The network also includes a handful of organisations in addition to aaa, including MyVillages, the Community Economies Institute, Revolte Botanique, and Remix the Commons.[2]

The hub component is a centre of popular ecology initiated in 2022 in Brezoi, a small town in the foothills of the Romanian Carpathians, situated along the Olt and Lotru Valleys. The hub forms part of the R-Urban network[3] and operates as both a novel institution and an experimental laboratory for re-imagining ecological futures. The principle of the R-Urban hubs is that they are run by citizens and facilitate an increased capacity for resilience by enabling ecological circularity and by catalysing bottom-up regeneration in suburban and peri-urban neighbourhoods. For this reason, our decision to locate TERRRA in a post-industrial context with a strong rural tradition was somewhat strategic: we were keen to explore not only the possibilities of participatory ecological regeneration within this kind of critical context, but also the idea that a hub can serve as an alternative educational institution in the places where it is most needed—where education is mutual, transversal, and ‘terrestrial’, as Bruno Latour would say, where it constitutes a form of engagement with our planet that centres subsistence, survival, and interdependence.[4]

Brezoi has experienced significant landscape degradation related to its industrial past and the decline of locally rooted forms of stewardship. Brezoi’s industrial development started at the beginning of the twentieth century with the establishment of a timber factory by an Italian company. This industrial development continued throughout the communist era until 1989. Today, like many post-socialist urban and rural areas in Romania, the town is marked by economic and social decline. [5] During industrialisation, traditional construction skills and DIY knowledge were largely lost, while agricultural practices survived only in marginal forms. In the post-industrial period, however, some of these practices persisted and required renewed support to expand and evolve. Many of these practices draw on ‘popular ecological knowledge’ cultivated over generations, bridging architecture with lived rural wisdom. It is exceptional that this popular ecological knowledge still exists in Romania alongside a few traditional institutions that continue the ancestral work of nature stewardship by promoting traditional agricultural techniques and collective forms of management. One such traditional institution is the obște—the ancient Romanian commons—which can still be found in the Brezoi area, where five obști currently collectively manage some 70 percent of the surrounding forested woodlands and pastures.

TERRRA responds to these conditions through both its programme and architecture. As a centre for popular ecology, it promotes landscape preservation and the revival of traditional practices of ecological restoration and construction, reconnecting them with contemporary forms of engagement and facilitating their transmission to younger generations of practitioners. TERRRA also collaborates with some of Brezoi’s obști to co-create a culture of sustainability—not just through the co-management of land, but through training, knowledge exchange, and network building. In doing so, it positions the obște not as a historical relic, but as a living and adaptable model of socio-ecological resilience.

The project is both locally embedded and international in its approach, opening up this very situated project to a trans-local network of organisations and initiatives that have now come to form its extended community. The site consists of a traditional household estate that was collectively acquired at the edge of the town, bordering the communal forest. The site, which measures 6,000 m², includes educational and residency spaces, seminar rooms, workshops for experimental making, and land dedicated to agroecological and forestry experimentation. Approximately half the site is woodland, complemented by an orchard, vegetable garden, stream, and pond. The buildings, realised in collaboration with local craftsmen and using traditional techniques and locally sourced materials, combine stone and wood for carbon sequestration, while a green roof planted with native species integrates the structure into its terrain. Solar-protective shutters ensure thermal comfort while preserving a barn-like typology. Water strategies address climate pressures through torrent diversion, ponds, and mini-canals for rainwater and greywater collection, maintaining 75 percent site permeability. The overall layout draws on traditional settlement logic.

This site—now collectively held by the TERRRA network—hosts a branch of Gilles Clément’s School of Planetary Gardeners, which embeds international ecological pedagogies within situated local practices.

The School of Planetary Gardeners

Since the 1990s, Gilles Clément has been developing the concept of the ‘planetary garden’, based on the idea that the Earth is a closed system whose ecological boundaries mirror those of a finite garden.[6] By the early 2000s, this philosophy had crystallised into the School of Planetary Gardeners, a programme designed to foster planetary stewardship through open, responsive learning. Now active in France, South America, and Romania, the school utilises situated pedagogies that are deeply tailored to local conditions and ecological needs.

Clément argues that, as inhabitants of planet Earth, ‘everyone should learn how to be a planetary gardener’. In rural Romania, in places such as Brezoi, many people—regardless of occupation—continue to maintain subsistence gardens, demonstrating a rich body of vernacular knowledge that is essential to maintaining both local well-being and planetary balance.

In this context, the TERRRA School serves as a hands-on learning space, grounded in both traditional and modern restorative landscape practices, forest and river management, mutuality and care for nature. It is a laboratory for re-generating skills and knowledge, a place to ‘learn by doing’, rooted in feminist approaches of embodied knowledge, but also in traditional methods of knowledge transmission.

As such, the school offers a trans-local alternative education programme that focuses on ecological reparation and rural care by facilitating encounters between local practitioners (peasants, farmers, forest workers, shepherds, and beekeepers), domain experts (on commons, biodiversity, rights of nature, and ecological remediation), artists, activists, and young people looking to effect meaningful change.

Clément has noted that many ‘popular ecological knowledges’ have been preserved in rural localities in Romania due to these areas’ partial insulation from capitalist development during and immediately after the communist regime.[7] At TERRRA, these deeply terrestrial skills are now combined with newer scientific and ecological practices, supported by a network of researchers, practitioners, and artists. Following Clément’s philosophy, there is a strong emphasis on multispecies co-learning, particularly through practices of ‘paying attention’, ‘slowing down’, and respecting le vivant—‘the living world’.[8] These approaches closely resonate with traditional agricultural and nature-stewardship techniques, in which careful observation, patience, and responsiveness to ecological rhythms constitute essential forms of knowledge.

Workshops centred on plants and insects create spaces where interspecies interactions can be closely observed and analysed, enabling participants to trace complex ecological relationships and vulnerabilities. Through this collaborative inquiry, collective strategies of care and protection emerge, cultivating an ethic of co-existence rather than dominance within the participants’ respective practices. These pedagogies frame learning as an embodied, ecological process that is deeply rooted in attentiveness to more-than-human life and the shared systems that sustain it.

Guided by contributors such as feminist economist Katherine Gibson, the school emphasises the deep interconnectedness of economy and ecology, preparing young practitioners to re-imagine their roles in society.[9] Additionally, the school is integrated into various interdisciplinary networks, forging connections with the Rural School of Economics, the Community Economies network, and other Schools of Planetary Gardeners from Clément’s network in order to foster a broader ecology of trans-local learning.

The TERRRA School subverts traditional roles in education processes by positioning local peasants as the primary teachers, while design students and young practitioners become the learners. This reversal challenges the hierarchical relations of institutional education—a principle drawn from feminist and radical pedagogies. What’s more, the pedagogical programme is framed as a ‘deschooling’ experience—one that learns from the locals and echoes Illich’s idea that ‘the best teacher of a skill is someone actively engaged in its useful practice’.[10] This approach to pedagogy decolonises learning by valorising local knowledge and embodied practices that have long been excluded from formal education models.

Reconnecting

One of TERRRA’s objectives is to mediate forms of reconnecting with nature that should thereby be understood as a ‘companion’ rather than merely a resource. This approach is directly expressed in the project’s architecture and in the way the site is inhabited. A significant portion of the land has been left to woodland, the orchard, the stream, and the pond, each treated as protected ecosystems where specific habitats are encouraged.

The hub employs local materials and crafts to reinterpret vernacular traditions, while simultaneously experimenting with more-than-human design through a series of on-site eco-prototypes. These include dry toilets, water-management systems, and circular waste infrastructures that enable composting, straw reuse, and dry sanitation. Together, these practices articulate an approach in which material systems, human labour, and ecological processes are treated as interdependent.

As such, the project actively rebuilds relationships between people, places, materials, and forms of knowledge that have been progressively severed by industrialised construction practices. TERRRA reconnects with local craftspeople who hold embodied, place-based knowledge of building with local materials—knowledge that is simultaneously cultural, ecological, and technical.

For the stone construction, we worked with Nea Ion Neț (82) and Nea Petre Neț (75), two stonemason brothers from Muiereasca, a nearby village long known for its craftsmanship. Craftspeople from this village have built houses for thousands of people living throughout the region. Today, the Neț brothers are among the last remaining stonemasons in the village, and their knowledge is at risk of disappearing. For this reason, we invited them to pass on their knowledge through hands-on workshops. For the wooden construction, TERRRA collaborated with Miradex, a new, locally founded timber company that seeks to revive vernacular timber-building techniques using local wood species, while making these methods economically accessible.[11]

Through a series of collective training workshops that accompanied the building process, these living techniques were transmitted to younger generations of professionals, thereby reconnecting past and future, manual practice and contemporary design, and human labour with material and ecological cycles. In this way, the process of reconnecting operated not merely as the recognition of diverse traditional skills and worldviews, but as an active negotiation of how they can co-exist and remain relevant within present and future modes of building and dwelling.

Reconnecting also took material forms—in the building material supply, and in the way the construction was integrated into the landscape. As such, timber was locally sourced from one of the obște woodlands, and the stone was collected from a ballast quarry along the Lotru Valley. The green roof was planted using local plant species, which will continue to self-seed over time. This allowed the structure to blend into the surrounding terrain, while the overall layout reflects traditional settlement patterns.

Infrastructuring le vivant

In Brezoi, where many springs and streams have dried up in recent years due to climate change, a summer module on water and soil drew on ecological insights from agroecology engineers Claude and Lydia Bourguignon.[12] Enhanced by contributions from Gilles Clément, the module went beyond proposing restorative hydrological measures; it fostered multispecies perspectives that reframed the Lotru River not merely as a utilitarian resource, but as an ecological companion that is central to the region’s health and well-being.

The training module run by gardeners from Le Temps de la Terre[13] included detailed explorations of the rainwater cycle and its interactions with local soils, plants, and insects, revealing the complex interdependencies that sustain biodiversity and regulate ecological balance. Water was approached not only as infrastructural matter, but as a common good embedded in collective memory and situated practice. This reframing enabled a dialogue between traditional ecological knowledge and contemporary planning, bridging ancestral forms of stewardship with present-day environmental governance.

As a practical component, a small pond was constructed in collaboration with students along the existing stream in order to capture rainwater and create habitats for specific plant and insect species. This intervention supports biodiversity and enhances the productivity of surrounding agricultural land, including orchards and vegetable gardens. Once common in traditional agricultural systems, pond ecologies of this kind have in many instances been abandoned due to the erosion of maintenance knowledge and unfounded concerns about invasive species. Yet when carefully designed and maintained, ponds function as balanced ecosystems in which each individual element contributes to sustaining ecological equilibrium. For example, dragonflies—the most common ‘eco-servants’ of pond habitats—act as guardians of ecosystem health. Unlike chemical pesticides, these natural pest controllers provide a sustainable solution for keeping insect populations in check without harming the environment. To maintain a healthy population of dragonflies, we had to carefully design their habitat and take care to plant species to support them at every stage of their lives—for when they require underwater camouflage, when they climb out of the water to transform, and when they perch while hunting. This created a very specific living landscape, including submerged and emergent plants and a nice mix of marginal and terrestrial plants that attract a variety of insects as food for dragonflies. The pond thus became a support infrastructure for many living entities and, at the same time, for our productive garden.

At its core, the whole TERRRA site and programme functions as an infrastructure for encounter and exchange between generations, between experts and locals, peasants and young agroecology professionals, and humans and non-humans; it is a place where we can all learn together.

Re-enchanting

Finally, one of TERRRA’s main aims is re-enchantment. As Silvia Federici argues in her book Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, re-enchantment can be understood as a vital dimension of re-imagination, particularly within feminist engagements with the commons.[14] The term enchant derives from the Old French chanter (English: to sing), evoking practices through which creation is brought into being via collective and affective engagement. In this sense, enchantment is not a nostalgic return to a romanticised past, but an opening toward the future.

At TERRRA, re-enchantment begins with situated learning processes that hone our awareness of the fractures that exist in our relationships with nature, other people, and ourselves. Rather than signalling failure, these fractures are approached as sites of latent potential that are charged with transformative possibility. The pedagogical programme enacts re-enchantment by reviving memory and re-storying past and future, while engaging ecological, social, and emotional dimensions that are otherwise often rendered invisible.

TERRRA also seeks to re-enchant younger generations of students and landscape designers, many of whom feel disillusioned by conventional education and the narrow horizons of professional practice. Here, learning is embodied and experiential: participants engage in practices such as scything meadows, building haystacks, observing root systems and mycorrhizal networks, and working with manual tools, thereby reconnecting with ecological cycles and material processes. These experiences are coupled with the capacity to narrate, communicate, and advocate alternative landscape practices.

Botanist Veronique Mure’s workshop on plant roots School of Planetary Gardeners 2024, © atelier d’architecture autogérée (aaa)

Re-enchantment, then, is not abstract, but sensorial and collective. It unfolds through collaborative labour, convivial moments, and attentive listening—everyday practices through which relationships are repaired and new imaginaries take root.

In a world that speaks so much and so loudly about war, money, and the finitude of resources, we need places that remind us that we have roots, hands, and hope for the future.

Doina Petrescu is Professor Emerita of Architecture and Design Activism at the University of Sheffield and co-founder, along with Constantin Petcou, of the award-winning Paris-based collective atelier d’architecture autogérée, which specialises in participatory architecture, commons-based resilience, and reparative ecologies. Her research, which explores urban commons, co-resilience, civic pedagogy, feminism, and the politics of space, bridging academic, design, practice-based, and activist approaches, has generated numerous publications over the years. Recent books include: Architecture Otherhow (2027), Live Act (2023), Urban Commons Handbook (2022), The Social (Re)Production of Architecture (2017), Learn to Act (2017), and R-Urban Act (2015).

Footnotes

[1] atelier d’architecture autogérée (aaa) is a Paris-based collective specialising in participatory architecture, commons-based resilience, and reparative ecologies, co-founded by Constantin Petcou and Doina Petrescu in 2001 (www.urbantactcs.org).

[2] TERRRA website: https://terrra.org (Access date: 1 October 2026).

[3] R-Urban website: https://r-urban.net (Access date: 1 October 2026).

[4] Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018).

[5] M. Mihăilă, ‘The Economic Transformation of Post-Communist Romania’, in The Romanian Economy in Transition, ed. L. Bădescu and M. Mihăilă (Iași: Alexandru Ioan Cuza University Publishing House, 2009), pp. 5–22.

[6] Clément and Coloco, 2022. In English: The Planetary Garden and Other Writings, trans. Sandra Morris (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).

[7] TERRRA Dialogues with Gilles Clément (video): www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBhOjPECV7E (Access date: 1 October 2026).

[8] Clément and Coloco, 2022.

[9] J.K. Gibson-Graham, ‘Diverse Economies: Performative Practices for “Other Worlds”’. Progress in Human Geography 32/5 (2008), pp. 613–663.

[10] Ivan Ilitch, Deschooling Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 79.

[11] Miradex’s website: www.miradex.ro (Access date: 1 October 2026).

[12] The Soil Laboratory founded by Claude and Lydia Bourguignon website: https://lams-21.com (Access date: 1 October 2026).

[13] Le Temps de la Terre website: https://letempsdelaterre.fr (Access date: 1 October 2026).

[14] Silvia Federici, Re-Enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2019), p. 189.