Field Notes: Repair
In this latest narrative survey, our goal is to explore the keen and rising interest in practices of repair, reuse, preservation, maintenance, and care, and the growing conviction that such practices are vitally important to our cultures and economies, our ecosystems and ecologies. In pursuing this theme, we are continuing the investigations of our series Repair Manual, which probes the sociotechnical transformation poised to reshape design (and much else): the paradigm shift from building the world to repairing the world.
By now the challenges are well-understood, and they are at once practical and philosophical, impossibly large and acutely specific. How might professions premised on growth and consumption — new buildings, new landscapes, new cities — adapt to the exigencies of degrowth and reuse? “Building” is a powerful metaphor that structures how we think about progress and accomplishment. What might be the new metaphors, the new rubrics, for an epoch of repair?
In the installments that follow, which were prepared in the months leading up to the U.S. presidential election, scholars, designers, planners, activists, and artists share brief observations on the challenges and issues they find especially relevant and pressing.
