The rural exodus of inland Portugal is a reality inundated with the remnants of authoritarian colonial thinking, capitalist linear metabolisms, and extractivist logic.

Rural Assemblies addresses the ongoing marginalisation, subjugation, and spatial injustice of inland Portuguese territories, forming a speculative response to a controversial land law implemented in January 2025. The project proposes a cyclical return to rural Portugal, though this time not as colonisers subjugating the land, but as stewards in reciprocity with it.

Three speculative architectural proposals emerge: local assemblies decentralising rural decision-making; a network of productive soft infrastructures that perform acts of stewardship for humans, non-humans, and the land; and speculative rural housing typologies for three semi-fictitious iterations of the student’s father.

The project is narrated through a reinterpretation of traditional azulejos as a critical design tool, employing a heterogeneous design methodology that merges vernacular rituals and generational oral histories as a situated epistemology.