Sustraiak Habitat Designis a Basque cooperative whose mission is to design, coordinate and implement multidisciplinary services on the territory and facilitate processes of comprehensive regeneration of habitats and ecosystems. Sustraiak Habitat Design works around four areas: The Design and Implementation of Habitat Regeneration Projects; the Implementation of Environmental Management Solutions; the Accompaniment of Community Empowerment, and the Educational Actions of Local Sustainability.
Sustraiak Habitat Design is a young cooperative, but with more than 30 years of accumulated experience in the hands of its four partners, seasoned in social and environmental entrepreneurship: Borja Izaola; architect, anthropologist and coach, who incorporates the urban context and tools for adaptation to climate change and sustainable rehabilitation. Eber Egino; agronomist, gardener and builder, who approaches the rural environment, with viable agroecological experiences and animal management. Ainara Otxoa; surveyor, landscaper and designer, who integrates natural ecosystems and systemic design. And David Gonzalez; Chemist, permaculturist and expert in renewables, who adds biomimetics to industrial processes, from an educational perspective and closure of cycles.
The four of them had been collaborating as freelancers for a few years and decided to join forces to focus their eyes on habitat regeneration. What habitat? Urban, rural, natural and industrial. Regenerating what? Socioeconomic, ecosystemic and productive processes. What for? To guard a territory, revitalize it and thus be able to sustain its human, plant and animal populations in the future. How?
With a systemic analysis of energy, material, trophic and information cycles; a design and implementation of new virtuous cycles, based on life, reproductive, feedback and resilient; and a long-term, meaningful, collaborative and competent management model.
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They work in collaboration with local/rural/regional Development Agencies, in which a territorial scale is cited with its specific problem to be reconsidered and solved , a socioeconomic dynamic pending adaptation to changing circumstances and a vision of the future that guarantees the sustainability and the vitality of the local habitat. They also offer their services to private entities, companies and different social groups committed to sustainability and the optimization of environmental and natural resources.
Faced with the problem of the devalued pine forest with a strong environmental and cultural impact, common to the mountains of the Cantabrian coast, they have made possible an intervention program that transforms it into an edible forest agrosilvopastoral capable of fixing soil, CO2, employment and population.
They have dimensioned a neighborhood avicompostera in which they meet the waste management service that saves its organic fraction, the neighborhood that exchanges its garbage for eggs and chickens, and the gardening service that buys local biofertilizer, with a system of social and complementary currency capable of generating community and resilience.
They have redesigned the “Baserri del s. XXI”, updating the cycles of collective and multigenerational housing, custody of private and communal land, ecological agro-livestock management, vernacular bioconstruction activities and the social transformation required by rural and peri-urban areas typical of the farmhouse.< /h3>
They have carried out the rehabilitation of the Novia Salcedo Fundazioa headquarters (www.noviasalcedo.es) together to Rener (www.rener.biz) in which they have generated the habitat of 30 workers + 20 students in almost daily courses + 40 daily visits through a brave integrative experiment. There was participatory design; light partitions were revalued; the energy audit and improvement was carried out; plants and natural materials were put in; hazardous waste was managed; a first professional practice was given to kids at risk of exclusion; innovations were made in cleaning products for the reuse of linoleum…; and it was executed on time and on budget!
With these tested and commercialized capacities, the Sustraiak Hábitat Design cooperative appears at the forefront of the new multidisciplinary teams, with a refined praxis of its technical specialties, perfectly integrated and accompanied by some social and ecological values that make the transition from the current economic system viable to a more friendly, sustainable and conscientious one.
They work in collaboration with local/rural/regional Development Agencies, in which a territorial scale is cited with its specific problem to be reconsidered and solved , a socioeconomic dynamic pending adaptation to changing circumstances and a vision of the future that guarantees the