Alison Whitten is the Senior Portfolio Manager – Resilient Communities with Resilient Melbourne. In this role, she leads a program designed to respond to the challenges facing Melbournians in light of the city’s rapid growth. The Resilient Communities program includes collaborations at five residential development sites that are testing innovative ways to involve residents in shaping their homes and neighbourhoods. In addition, Alison is working with partners from government, academia, and the private sector to incorporate resilience-building measures into development policy and practice.
Alison began asking questions about how to build community resilience well before she’d ever heard the term. As an engineering student in the United States, she drew connections between environmental sustainability and social equity in housing through research and design-build projects. Later, working as a management consultant in South Africa, she found inspiration in grassroots efforts to address vast, systemic injustices in local housing provision. Coming to the realisation that urban planning was in her future, Alison left consulting, applied to planning programs, and worked with friends on a ‘one-season wonder’ organic vegetable farm before returning to school.
Through professional roles in consulting, international development and planning, Alison’s work has spanned multiple sectors and geographies, including Australia, the US, China, and Sub-Saharan Africa. In addition to housing, she has keen interests in the intersection of design with public health, food systems, and disaster risk mitigation and response. She is convinced that we can build better cities, even if it means thinking one resilient community at a time.