The Great Repair – Politics for the Repair Society

Our modern world is based on the cheapening of ­nature and human life, argue environmental historian Jason W. Moore and economist Raj Patel. 
In conversation with guest editor Milica Topalović, Alex Nehmer of ARCH+, and architect Nitin Bathla, they discuss how to repair the damage caused by the colonial capitalist world system without resorting to fixes that merely displace these crises. 

Photo essay: Bas Princen

The philosopher and political scientist Olúfémi O. Táíwò calls for thinking climate justice together with repa­rations for historical injustice. With ARCH+ editors Alex Nehmer and Markus Krieger, he discusses how his materialist understanding of repair can be made fertile for the urgently needed transformations in ­architecture.

Photo Essay: Richard Misrach

– Sub specie conservatoris

The concept of the “repair society” was coined in 1993 at the conference From the Modern to the Postmodern Cult of Monuments? in Passau, Bavaria.¹ Admittedly, there is an inflation in such hyphenated labels to characterize society.

In the 1990s, the then Regional Conservator of Upper Austria and later president of ICOMOS Austria, Wilfried Lipp, coined the term “repair society” in a pioneering essay, parts of which are reprinted in this issue. In conversation with guest editor Florian Hertweck, heritage theorist and architect Silke Langenberg as well as ARCH+’s Alex Nehmer and Markus Krieger he reflects on the term’s topicality and how it can be made productive for The Great Repair project.

The world-wide consumption of resources continues to rise steadily. Earth Overshoot Day (i. e., the symbolic point in time at which we humans have used up all ­natural resources the Earth can produce in one year) comes earlier each year. In 2022, it occurred as early as July 28, meaning that in the five following months of the year we lived at the expense of the future.

How can we think together ecology and social justice in the urging transformations in architecture and urban planning, instead of the one being played off against the other? This is discussed here by urban researcher Anton Brokow-Loga and urban and spatial sociologist Katrin Großmann with guest ­editor Florian Hertweck as well as ARCH+’s Alex Nehmer and Markus Krieger.

The material culture of the Global North is more than ever characterized by the principle of creative destruction. Constant innovation is its primary goal. As technologies age ever more quickly, however, ever more waste is produced.

What are the consequences when novelty and innovation take precedence over all else? How can we raise awareness of the importance of repair and care instead? The science 
and technology historians Andrew L. Russell and Stefan Krebs discussed these questions and more with guest editors Florian Hertweck and Marija Marić.

The capitalist logic of turning all social relations into commodities has led to a deep crisis in the reproduction of life.¹ What is required by way of a response is a practice of care, which for Joan C. Tronto and Berenice Fisher “includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible.”

(Re)appropriation is a troubled word. It carries the baggage of what has been appropriated throughout history: lands, peoples, animals, plants, knowledges, resources. Yet, it is this fraught relationship with the past that makes it a gesture of resistance, reclamation, empowerment, decolonialization, and reparation.

The themes of repair and reparation have long been a focus of Kader Attia’s artistic and curatorial work. As curator of the Berlin Biennale 2022, he gave ­special emphasis to repair as a form of agency and means for decolonial resistance. In conversation with architects Charlotte Grace and Dubravka Sekulić, he discusses how we can ­repair the wounds that ­modernity has inflicted on the world.

According to Émile Durkheim, capitalism not only ­destroyed earlier ties and relationships, but precisely through the division of labor in modern industrialized societies also created “a new sense of interdependence”: “Increasing differentiation and individualization, on the one hand, and growing solidarity, on the other, […] thus did not contradict but conditioned each other.¹

Architecture and planning have long been instruments of colonial capitalist exploitation of people and land, ­argues Paulo Tavares. With Markus Krieger and Alex ­Nehmer, he discusses how the disciplines can ­begin to decolonize and align themselves with the struggles of Indigenous communities to repair the Earth.

Philosopher Oxana Timofeeva was still in St. Petersburg when she spoke with Alex Nehmer, Milica Topalović, and Nazlı Tümerdem in early July 2022, before she had to leave Russia. What are the possibilities of resistance under ­totalitarian regimes? Can solidarity be a response to the catastrophic times we live in?

For a long time, the Western mainstream saw government control and privatization as the only two ways of managing common-pool natural resources. Elinor Ostrom, however, was able to prove in 1990 that many communities worldwide relied on institutions other than the state or the market to govern the ­commons.¹

Text: Antonia Agreda, Liliana Armero, Pablo Cuchalá, Santiago del Hierro, Agripina Garreta, Álvaro Hernández Bello, Yeni Yolanda Jacanamijoy, Pedro Jajoy, Mariela Pujimuy Transcription support: Lizeth Córdoba

While the contemporary problems of architecture as a profession have been in the making for a long time, architects have historically dedicated little attention to the inner crises of their discipline. Thus its alli­ances with the extractive practices of construction ­industries and real estate markets, as well as the ­labor, gender, social, racial, and other internal inequalities, have long remained unchallenged.

Architecture, its workers, students, institutions, and resources, are burned out. Recognized by the World Health Organization as an “occupational phenomenon,” burnout can be considered not only a physical or mental condition but also a historical condition, a point of culmination in which bodies refuse to cater to the exploitative logic of capitalist production.¹

To build is to destroy. From steel bolts to concrete blocks to wood flooring to polyester insulation panels, every single component of the built environment is the product of extractive processes.