Intercultural Living Labs, Cognitive Sovereignty and Geoethics: artificial intelligence in cultural landscapes

Abstract

This article examines intercultural Living Laboratories (Intercultural Living Labs) as situated devices for dialogue and co-production within the context of a long-term project working with communities in Portugal and Brazil. In these settings, the current dialogue phase with artificial intelligence, as part of the ‘Agora – Cultural Landscape Community AI Hub’ project based at the Instituto Terra e Memória and coordinated by the authors, is not taking place in a methodological vacuum or in contexts that are not mediated by technology. Rather, it builds upon well-established paths of co-creation, where Living Labs and Digital Humanities tools have long been utilised as instruments of dialogue with communities for purposes such as representation, cultural preservation, feedback, decision support, and institutional negotiation. Throughout this process, technologies have evolved, but the underlying principles have remained consistent: humanities contribution for community-based landscape management, anchored in knowledge building, ethics, participation, respect for local cultures, community empowerment and co-constructed foresight. The current phase involving AI introduces a new level of complexity, particularly in terms of scale, opacity, circulation and governance, without breaking from this normative framework.
In this context, the article introduces the concept of cognitive sovereignty, which describes a collective's historical and continuously evolving capacity to sustain its own systems of memory, interpretation, classification, and future projection. This includes the incorporation, rejection, or reinterpretation of external influences. The article argues that Intercultural Living Labs do not create this sovereignty but rather make the broader processes through which communities are already reconfiguring their relationships with technologies and knowledge infrastructures more observable and negotiable. Adopting a transdisciplinary perspective, the discussion seeks to integrate scientific and situated knowledge in a robust methodological framework, without reducing these distinct knowledge systems to an arithmetic sum or dissolving the specificities of their production and validation regimes. Within this framework, the article contributes to geoethics by shifting the focus from the individual conduct of professionals to the ethics of situated socio-technical infrastructures that mediate relationships between communities, data, models, and cultural landscapes.
As the dialogue phase with AI, which began in 2025, is still in its early stages, this article focuses on concepts and methods rather than presenting established results. At this stage, the dialogue is primarily focused on experiments with generative AI for creating and reformulating narratives and forms of representation, territorial modelling for visualising and comparing scenarios, and prototyping data curation and exploration tools in secure test environments. These experiments are not considered ends in themselves, but rather as tools for supporting community reflection, decision-making and territorially-based forms of anticipatory governance. Thus, the article offers initial reflections on this dialogue and its ethical-political challenges and geoethical implications, as well as its emerging forms of mediation. This paves the way for future analyses of more established empirical developments in this process.