1st Edition

Repair Sustainable Design Futures

Edited By Markus Berger, Kate Irvin Copyright 2023
    288 Pages 128 Color Illustrations
    by Routledge

    288 Pages 128 Color Illustrations
    by Routledge

    A collection of timely new scholarship, Repair: Sustainable Design Futures investigates repair as a contemporary expression of empowerment, agency, and resistance to our unmaking of the world and the environment. Repair is an act, metaphor, and foundation for opening up a dialogue about design’s role in proposing radically different social, environmental, and economic futures.

    Thematically expansive and richly illustrated, with over 125 visuals, this volume features an international, interdisciplinary group of contributors from across the design spectrum whose voices and artwork speak to how we might address our broken social and physical worlds. Organized around reparative thinking and practices, the book includes 30 long and short chapters, photo essays, and interviews that focus on multiple responses to fractured systems, relationships, cities, architecture, objects, and more.

    Repair will encourage students, academics, researchers, and practitioners in art, design and architecture practice and theory, cultural studies, environment and sustainability, to discuss, engage, and rethink the act of repair and its impact on our society and environment.

    Foreword by Arturo Escobar

    Introduction by Markus Berger and Kate Irvin

    PART 1: Reparative Thinking_Broken Worlds

    Five Theses on Repair in Most of the World

    Avishek Ganguly

    Who Decides? Power, Brokenness, and Healing

    Lorèn Spears

    Repairing the Cracked Concrete

    Nakeia Medcalf

    Broken Urban: Repair as Postapocalyptic Design

    Utku Balaban

    Why Save This?

    Anna Rose Keefe

    Repair and Imperfection through the Lens of the Spectral

    Jakko Kemper and Ellen Rutten

    For the rain, for the wind

    Brian Goldberg

    PART 2: Reparative Practices_Wounds, Sutures, and Scars

    Aesthetics of Visible Repair: The Challenge of Kintsugi

    Yuriko Saito

    Repair and Design Futures: An Exhibition and Call to Action

    Kate Irvin

    Darning Over Renewal

    Jeremy Lee Wolin

    Thinking Rubble: Ruin and Repair at War’s End

    Lynnette Widder

    Open Dialogues and Material Memory

    Ariel Wills

    What Is the Work of Love Today? Repair, Care, and Carrying

    Lu Heintz

    Kurhirani no ambakiti (Burning the Devil): Since That’s the Only Way They Listen to Us

    Adela Goldbard

    PART 3: Reparative Thinking_Alternative Ways

    Borderlanders: A Political Concept for Repair

    Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar

    Repair on the Move

    Bec Barnett and Tristan Schultz

    My Grandmother’s Mended Socks: Layered Design Thinking and Durability

    Christina Kim

    Is Business Beyond Repair?

    Gary Blythe

    Repairing Imaginations: Rethinking the Ethics of Growth and Degrowth

    Ijlal Muzaffar

    Is Repair Repairing Architecture?

    Olga Ioannou

    Trans-Repair: Emancipatory Techno-Poetics

    Paula Gaetano-Adi

    PART 4: Reparative Practices_Patched and Reassembled

    Community Repair in South Africa: An Interview with Kevin Kimwelle

    Esther Akintoye and Markus Berger

    Fixing as Learning

    Steven Lubar

    Make-Do-and-Mend: The Repair and Reuse of Existing Buildings

    Sally Stone

    Hand Me Up

    Jussara Lee

    Recovering a Sense of Place

    Evelyn Eastmond, M Eiffler, David Kim, and Joy Ko

    (Hi)Stories of Repair

    Lindsay French

    Notions of Repair as a Pedagogical Dialogue

    Clarisse Labro

    Toward Repairing the Social Fabric: Music Performance and Pedagogy at Work

    Sebastian Ruth

    PART 5

    Epilogue: Stronger Futures—a Call to Action

    Lexicon of repair

    Biography

    Markus Berger is Professor of Interior Architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). He is the founder and director of The Repair Atelier.

    Kate Irvin is Curator and Head of the Department of Costume and Textiles at the RISD Museum, an integral part of the Rhode Island School of Design.

    "There’s no hope for a sustainable future without ‘Care and Repair’ becoming as sexy and seductive as ‘Use and Lose’. In this very timely book we have some smart creative minds riffing on how to start this re-imagining. There’s a deliveryman at the door. On the cardboard box is written ‘HANDLE WITH CARE AND REPAIR.’"

    Peter Gabriel, musician, singer, songwriter, record producer and activist

    "Pulling together scholars and activists from around the world, this splendidly curated collection of essays forcefully reminds us how varied repair is, the remarkable skills such work requires, and the crucial role of such work in resistance to the unrelenting powers of decay and destruction."

    Elizabeth V. Spelman, Professor of Philosophy, Smith College

    "This text makes an essential contribution to debates about repair now exploding across design, the fine arts, architectural studies, critical theory and many other spaces and places. Beautifully illustrated, carefully curated and containing a wide range of vital critical interventions from some of the leading thinkers and practitioners in the field, this book will set the agenda for sustainable repair studies for years to come."

    Damian White, Dean of Liberal Arts and Professor of Social Theory and Environmental Studies, RISD

    "Repair: Sustainable Design Futures is an important contribution to the ongoing discussion about repair, with a special focus on its significance and impact on society and the environment."

    Silke Langenberg, Editor of Repair. Encouragement to think and make (2018) and Upgrade. Making things better (2022)

    "'Repair' is a word that is simple yet complex. The authors show how different ways of thinking contribute to a broader notion of this simple word, one based in different ways of knowing. Through this exploration they develop more eclectic understandings of the world we live in, the processes and systems that surround us, how these inform what we do and fundamentally help us make sense of who we are. This book is an excellent example of how we can think and act to be better participants on this planet."

    Pradeep Sharma, Director of Arts|Culture|Heritage at the Salama bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Foundation