Woolgathering : Wool as a resource for rural regeneration

Abstract: Woolgathering aims to speculate around ways to reduce the wasteof wool and how wool can catalyze the regeneration of ruralvillages in the north of Sweden. In Sweden today, we producearound 1000 metric tons of wool per year, yet only about half of it isused. This is due to its varied quality and a lack of political support,economic incentive and a low demand on global and nationalmarkets causing a loss of knowledge in wool management andfailing value chains. Modern monocultural agriculture has phasedout traditional sheep breeds and vital semi-natural pastures whichhas had detrimental effects on biodiversity, cultural heritage andland ownership. Björkå, a rural village Västernorrland, has had adwindling population and is in need of regeneration in order toalleviate symptoms of rural neglect. Inspired by the architecutralaccpuncture employed in Songyang and the Brown sugar factoryin Xing village as well as the cooperative management of thefarms in Marinaleda, and a visits to Björkå and one of the manylocal sheep farms, I identified wool as a potential catalyst forthis development along with a series of devices to be employedin a rural regeneration strategy: rural-urban links, tourism, localeconomy, cultural heritage, industry and nature. The woolgathering strategy, like the darning of woolensocks, introduces these devices along with local and regionalactors as threads that feed into the fabric of Björkå aiming torestore its integrity. There is a focus on locally controlled industrywhere economical profits feed back into the community but alsoon collaboration between local and national wool actors. Thecentral core of the strategy merges the 6 devices with the 5 actors. The different threads and wool programmes merge andform new associations, or become integrated into new (virtualand physical) networks that expand well beyond the rural locality. With wool as the catalyst, the strategy can start to mend thegaps in the territory, reconnecting links to endogenous networkswithin the wool industry and exogenous networks between actorsand create economic viability for sheep farmers locally and across Norrland.