Founded to work on regenerative urban development, the Sweet Water Foundation uses “creative and regenerative social justice methods that build safe, vibrant spaces starting with community action and transforming the ecology of so-called ‘rundown’ neighbourhoods”. This is what took place, for example, in the Commonwealth neighbourhood in Chicago’s South Side: an attempt to build an alternative to the everyday chaos of financial instability, violence, poverty and systemic racism, returning to the community renewed, productive urban landscapes that had previously lost their original function and been abandoned. This hybridization of architecture, agriculture, housing, services, and urban fabric acts as a kind of acupuncture for the neighbourhood, rehabilitating its status and its identity.
