El-Ayoun Living Lab – MESIL – Middle East Social Innovation Lab

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Spring Landscape in Ajloun, Jordan, seen from Irjan Wadi

The El-Ayoun Living Lab is part of the project ‘Middle East Partnership for Productive Landscapes – MEPROLAND’. Within this DAAD-funded framework, we develop an integrated community management supporting the economic, social and environmental innovation of the villages surrounding the Ajloun Reserve in Jordan. This process is led by the Royal Society for the Conservaton of Nature (RSCN).

The El-Ayoun Living Lab provides an authentic learning context for young academics and students. The landscape and people of El-Ayoun represent a concrete system context that needs to be understood from various prespectives. We combine multiple methods to advance our shared understanding of this context as a basis for community activiation and sustainable local change.

Explore people and landscapes of El-Ayoun

Six first ideas for a productive landscape

During the living lab workshop in November 2021, the MESIL and MEPROLAND teams of students and young academics developed the following innovation ideas together with the local community:

MeProLand Community Workshop March 2022

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From 10.-12.03.2022 a community workshop was organized in Ajloun to evaluate and further develop the activities in the Living Lab. 9 people from the core team and about 20 members from the community conducted a 2-3 hour workshop on each of three central topics of the project work in the Lab (Community Center, Sustainable Tourism, Agriculture). In addition, a landscape & community safari was conducted to key stakeholders and sites (museum, Rasun Camp-Side, Zahrat Recreational Space, agricultural cooperative, historical sites).

Finally, some projects were prioritized and we agreed on the further procedure for the preparation of the project week in October 2022.