Building Roads to Resilience
Uncovering the values that form the roots of a resilient community.
December 2022
A speculative fiction chapter, written in collaboration with Mabala Nyalugwe, about what it looks like when communities are trusted to lead their own futures.
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This piece began, like the best collaborations do, with a question that neither of us could answer alone: what does it actually take to seed resilient futures within communities?
Mabala Nyalugwe brings lived expertise from humanitarian fieldwork — running human-centred design projects with international agencies across the Republic of Congo and Sub-Saharan Africa, with a focus on sexual and reproductive health. I come at it from a different angle: as a storyteller who uses multiple mediums to ask what imagination can do in the service of more equitable processes.
Together, we contributed a chapter to an anthology exploring speculative futures and community design. The brief asked us to produce something in four parts: an introduction to our process, a fiction narrative, an artefact (in our case a business plan), and individual reflections. What emerged was a close conversation about two pressure points in any project cycle — the entry and the exit. How do you come into a community? And what happens when you leave?
This is a futures fiction narrative set in the year 2031. Read more about the project, excerpts from the narrative and reflections from the authors below.
This is a provocation of alternative structures of support that encourage self reliance as a means towards building resilience in communities.
