Escanda - whose name stands for 'Espacio Social Colectivo para la Autogestion, la Diversidad y la Autonomia' (Collective Social Space for Self-Organisation, Diversity and Autonomy) is situated in a small mountain town above the run- down village of Pola de Lena, some 20 kilometres south of Oviedo in northern Spain. 'Every day more people, especially youth, are abandoning the countryside in search of better conditions in cities,' explain the project's founders. To make things worse, the state and EU subsidies on which the region relies are due to dry out in the coming years.'

But the area's apparent lack of future prospects, say Escanda's founders, 'is a great motivation for us to come here.' We believe that regions in crisis offer good possibilities for people to take control of their lives, through the construction of the type of social relations that we want to experiment with at Escanda. The project's goal is to create a space where new combinations and connections between individuals as well as networks can occur, with the aim 'to create long term alternatives that reduce our dependency on both the market and the state'.

Escanda have organised a wide variety of projects, from those aimed more at activists: a week-long gender and activism seminar in September 2003, a conference about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict held in Barcelona, a workshop about the possibilities of self-organising wireless internet access, involvement in the development of a European (and potentially global) 'network of autonomous spaces' to those on a direct local level: some of Escanda's residents are involved in teaching seminars on sustainability, gender, and globalisation in the local school. Other projects attemp to support and develop further possibilities for self-sufficient farming, or alternative energies. 'We don't conceive the two places where we are setting up Escanda as our base to escape away from society and isolate ourselves in closed harmonious communities,' explain the project's founders. 'Rather, we want them to be continuous convergence spaces, open to people from all over the world who identify with these perspectives of social change, where local and global networks of grassroots struggle can share experiences and skills, exchange ideas and create new dynamics of solidarity and resistance.'