2018/01/18 by Manuela Farinosi, Leopoldina Fortunati · 2 citations
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Crafts, Textile, and Design #Public Spaces through Art #Fashion and Cultural Textiles
paper · doi:10.1177/0196859917753419
openalex publication_date 2018/01/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
The aim of this article is to explore urban knitting as a worldwide social movement, rather than solely a kind of “inoffensive urban graffiti” made with knitted fabric. Building on the available literature and original research, the article argues that this movement weaves together elements from craftivism, domesticity, handicraft, art, and feminism. It then explores a specific urban knitting initiative, called “Mettiamoci una pezza” (“Let’s patch it”), carried out in L’Aquila, Italy, 3 years after the earthquake that devastated the city in 2009. To analyze the sociopolitical aspects of this initiative, a series of qualitative research studies was conducted over time, to which were added semistructured interviews with the initiative’s local organizers. The findings show that the initiative in L’Aquila clearly exhibits the five original features of the urban knitting movement that emerge from the literature as being characteristic of this movement.