Tending to Ground: Infrastructure for Care and Connectedness

Tending To Ground

South Boston, MA

Team: Lauralee Williams, Natalie Khoo, Eric VanDreason

The current Green New Deal recognizes improvements to transit strictly according to carbon-emission, energy-efficiency and vehicular modernization, allowing current modes of capital accumulation by private actors to continue unabated. We are proposing a societal shift away from existing, single-use transit infrastructure and towards a set of multifunctional spaces where we prioritize the collective, and in that, the recognition of labor done by all living things in socio-ecological solidarity. This project finds it’s foundation in a Manifesto for five essential Forms of Care: Growth, Production, Efficiency, Commodity, and Resource.. We designed five (5) assemblages in five selected areas of South Boston, which we will call Gardens.

The Gardens: Home, Depot, Conservatory, Esplanade, and Nursery.

For each garden we created an information pamphlet to encourage and educate residents and offer unique ways to get involved with the long-term development of the Gardens.

Each information pamphlet includes a Deployment and Transition Strategy timeline to help residents understand the Garden proposal. The Forms of Care are expanded to specifically address the characteristics of each Garden, such as the type of maintenance that will be needed over time, and the long-lasting benefits of caring for Below is an example from the Home Garden pamphlet. To the right are samples of maintenance details in the Conservatory and Nursery Gardens showing the projects in multilple phases of deployment.

A Glimpse into the Home Garden