The LEARN[IN] Lab II took place from November 26-28, 2019 in Guimarães. According to the motto “Learning from the ordinary”, the team from the School of Architecture of the University of Minho selected Pevidém as a learning place. Being one of the most important industrial textile centers of Vale do Ave Territory, this area, without formal limits, is located in the municipality of Guimarães, Portugal, and has a population of 15 000 people.

To give an idea of the learning territory, the Vale do Ave is a large urbanized area with a dimension of 433 sq. kilometres with 345 158 inhabitants, where housing is intertwined with agricultural land, textile industries and domestic production. The Vale do Ave is also the second urban system of the Portuguese northwest city-region (Sá & Domingues, 2002: 74). The city-region has a geographical extension that goes from Aveiro to Viana do Castelo, with a total of three million inhabitants.

With an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approach, the Lab II involved students from Architecture, Design and Visual Arts organized in four working groups. Each group gathered students from these three fields of knowledge, as well as students from the three different schools engaged in the LEARN[IN] project. The professors from the three participating universities acted as group moderators and catalyzers, interacting, simultaneously, with all the working groups, stimulating the discussion and reflection of the ideas that were brought up.