Knitting the Alewife

Collective resilience touches every aspect of our shared lives and is only possible when owned and enacted by the people of the place in partnership with professionals, nonprofits, and government representatives. Knitting the Alewife is building a resilience learning community of community actors, municipal and state governments, university researchers, and local and regional nonprofits. The goals are to collaboratively understand and steward the Alewife as an eco-social system, find shared meaning in climate data, explore and evaluate alternative futures, and co-implement knitting projects across borders and boundaries of all kinds.

The project focuses on how to build the missing social and political infrastructure and frameworks that can support co-creation by all. Without these, design projects can be rooted in Power Over* techniques without realizing the full potential that leads to true resiliency in a Power With process.

Creation of the following supported this process:

• An Alewife cross-boundary housing study and visualization to inform resilient stewardship of the whole system by all
• Resilient whole-systems mapping and communication materials to co-create across boundaries
• A reframing of working design methods to enable community actors, government, and professionals to co-construct knowledge and action about resilience together across boundaries, to transform Power Over to Power With, towards greater spatial justice.

*Power Over is systemic injustice in which dominant cultural norms, behaviors, values, and identities are privileged in professional and everyday practice. Power With prioritizes mutualism and co-creation. (Concept from Patricia Evans)