Politics for the Repair Society

There is always a better product ready and waiting. Repair is not worthwhile. German architectural ­discourse has come up with a particularly striking ­euphemism to describe the demolish-and-­replace ­approach: Ersatzneubau, or new construction ­replacing existing buildings. It thus comes as no ­surprise that today, waste from construction and demolition accounts for more than half of the total waste accumulating in Germany.

What is neglected here is that the extent of what needs to be repaired is constantly growing. After all, the total mechanization and technologization of modern life go hand in hand with a natural (or planned) obsolescence of the technologies used. However, despite the prevailing throwaway mentality, cities, infrastructures, and buildings are more often converted or kept in use than torn down. A plethora of technical devices are repaired and maintained day in, day out. Maintenance, repair, and servicing form an important sector of the economy. Key statistics reveal that today, more engineers work in the field of repair than in that of development.¹

This is not a particularly well-known fact, as repair work is hardly glamorous and often Sisyphean. It takes place behind closed doors: an everyday, minute occurrence. It is precisely in these qualities that it unfolds its power, and precisely where the project The Great Repair takes its starting point, seeking to surpass the pragmatic level and point to the geopolitical, socio-economic, and ecological dependencies behind the material assemblages, infrastructures, and social interactions of our societies. When we speak of the great repair, those major contexts in need of repair are exactly what we mean.

And great is the need for repair given the degree of destruction of the world. The impact of the climate crisis and of dwindling resources—with the loss of biodiversity and dying forests, with flooding and storms, heat waves and droughts—is already causing death, starvation, and migration in the Global South, where large areas are becoming uninhabitable for humans and animals. In the future, military conflicts over energy, infrastructures, and food will increase as a corollary of the climate ­crisis, effecting inescapable battles for geopolitical control over territories and resources. Given these factors, it becomes evident that not only everyday life will be destabilized, but geopolitical architectures and borders as well. This holds true not just of the Global South, but has long applied to Europe, where in the last 30 years, average temperatures have risen 0.5 °C per decade.²

In light of the planetary scale of these escalating crises, one might ask how such a cautious concept as that of repair might help. No doubt, many will object: Should we not, like previous modernist movements, evoke grand visions rather than proclaiming a “Great Repair”? It is in this contrast between cautious circumspection and global perspective, however, that we see the outstanding characteristic of The Great Repair. ­Considering that the major crises were triggered precisely by modernity’s grand visions, we need a new paradigm.

To repair that which is broken, the first step is to assess the damage. We should, therefore, “take erosion, breakdown, and decay, rather than novelty, growth, and progress, as our starting points in thinking through the use of nature,” as information scientist Steven J. Jackson suggests.³ However, in the Global North, the powerful narrative still prevails that we will only succeed in getting a handle on the climate and resource crisis and uncouple economic growth from its environmental impacts by using technological innovation and development. In this vision of a green capitalist transformation, renewable energies are expected to cover the needs of industry and a constantly growing number of urban consumers in a climate-neutral fashion, while smart technologies regulate the flows of people, goods, and energy with ever greater efficiency, manage the recycling of materials, close energy cycles, and bind greenhouse gases. The loss of biodiversity and the leaching and depletion of the soils would, so the argument goes, be solved by the automation of industrial agriculture, by food technology, by reducing food waste across the entire supply chain, and by the mass introduction of vegan nutrition and products. The raw materials necessary would, it continues, possibly even be extracted extraterrestrially by future technologies.

This vision is coupled with the political hope that growing material prosperity on the basis of green technologies would enable the strengthening and spread of “liberal market democracies” against the “increasing threat by authoritarianism.” These narratives are so appealing because, in the end, they support the political status quo: Neither politicians nor citizens need to structurally change, nor is the underlying capitalist economic system with its mechanisms of exploitation and unequal distribution cast into doubt. The danger of such a mindset stems from the fact that it pushes the necessary repair of the system down the road into the future, further intensifying the global geography of inequalities, and superficially papering over the climate crisis with an inflation of greenwashing and innovation speak. It is impossible to discard the contradictions of such visions: For all the technological innovations and improvements in efficiencies in recent years, the claims and the reality they purport to describe are as far apart as the ambitious goals of the Paris Climate Agreement from the real planetary greenhouse gas emissions. Despite massive efforts, the “green solution” does not yet work.

Repair society

For this reason, The Great Repair is putting forward a counternarrative that focuses on the human ability to redesign our relationships within the social and natural environment: from the conditions of production and social participation all the way to issues of justice; from the built environments and eco-systems all the way to the Earth’s climate. As a counterstrategy to capitalist modernity’s creative destruction, we advocate a focus on care, maintenance, and repair as the key action strategies. This concept of repair does not aim at reconstructing an idealized, original state, but at regenerative transformation toward a better state. Unlike in the case of (techno-)fixes, the focus here is not simply on troubleshooting functional disturbances: Repair means to bring the world “back into equilibrium,” as heritage preservation theorist Wilfried Lipp wrote in his seminal essay “Rettung von Geschichte für die Reparaturgesellschaft im 21. Jahrhundert” (Rescuing History for the Repair Society of the 21st Century), quoting from an old encyclopedia.⁴ As early as 1993, speaking at a conference on heritage preservation, Lipp coined the term “repair society” as a new societal guiding principle,⁵ one that he understood to be, “both diagnostic and therapeutic, offering a perspective and making an appeal.”⁶

In other words, we are in the midst of ‘repair.’ Things are being repaired everywhere. 
This refers, and I am just highlighting things by keywords here, to general environmental measures for the air (reducing emissions), water (quality, sewer systems, consumption), the oceans (reducing the stress factors on them), soil (over-use of fertilizers), wood, forests (‘dying forests,’ excessive logging, rainforests). […]

Something like a ‘repair of the human’ has been set in motion. […] Eventually, the goal 
is a ‘repair’ of the system of labor primarily defined economically in terms of production and sales, labor that is defined in this logic 
as an endless chain of abundance—accumu­lation—waste⁷

Shortly after Lipp, political scientist Claus Leggewie likewise proclaimed the repair society in his 1995 book Die 89er: Portrait einer Generation (The 1989ers: Portrait of a Generation)⁸; returning to the concept in 2016 together with Jürgen Bertling: “Die Reparaturgesellschaft: Ein Beitrag zur großen Transformation?” (The Repair ­Society: A Contribution to a Great Transformation?).⁹ Alluding to Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (1944),¹⁰ Leggewie and Bertling locate the discourse on repair in line with the technological history of the industrial “great transformation,” which, according to Polanyi, led to the independence and hegemony of the “free” market vis-à-vis society: “Instead of economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system.”¹¹ The consequence of this “great transformation” is the ruthless exploitation of humans and nature. According to Polanyi, this process can only be reversed if, instead of the ideal of a free, self-regulating market to which all social relationships are subordinate, a notion of a free and self-determined society defines political action. In this sense, the Great Repair project entails nothing less than a realignment of the fundamentals, norms, processes, and objectives of our economic system toward economies of repair and care, in order for the economy to be re-embedded in society, and society, for its part, to be re-embedded in the natural environment.

Almost in passing, Leggewie and Bertling point out the breaking point at which the project of The Great Repair will have to intervene:

We can assume that manufacturing and repairing things prior to the emergence of the manufacturing system and subsequent industrialization was handled by the same set of actors. For both actions, the same skills and tools were needed, and in many cases the subsequent repair was probably already factored into the manufacturing process. Seen through the lens of the history of technology, manufacturing and repair parted ways in conjunction with the increasing mechanization of the core processes of manufacturing: material processing and design.¹²

In other words, the capitalist industrial economic system is based not only on “the process of separation of producer and the means of production,” as Karl Marx described,¹³ but also on the separation of production and repair, resulting in commodities that are interchangeable black boxes bereft of any social relationships. The resulting alienation is profound and extends from the conditions of production through to personal consumer behavior: The product intended for consumption possesses neither a connection to the labor processes that went into manufacturing it, nor to those that would be necessary for its maintenance and repair. On a societal level, this development goes hand in hand with a self-imposed technical immaturity, a loss in “skills and tools” with which people could design and repair the worlds in which they live. Conversely, this means that a Great Repair can only have an emancipatory impact if it provides people with repair tools. Accordingly, Silke Langenberg gave her 2018 book Reparatur the subtitle Anstiftung zum Denken und Machen (Instigation to Think and Do).¹⁴ A Great Repair must follow the motto that ­architect Yoshiharu Tsukamoto from Atelier Bow-Wow formulated in the context of his research project, the Satoyama School of Design¹⁵: “Tools to the People!”¹⁶

This call touches on a central theme in Marxist theory, if we translate tools to signify the “means of production.” Marx believed that the concentration of ownership of tools, materials, and machines as the “means of production” in the hands of a few formed the core of the capitalist system—and to overcome it (in theory), the means of production had to be reappropriated by society: They have to be socialized. In this regard, the Great Repair project is more modest, less revolutionary, and more grounded in everyday life. The emphasis is on increasing each individual’s agency by centering not the anonymous consumption, but the caring and maintaining of the world in which they live. To paraphrase Kant, we could say: The Great Repair is humans’ escape from their self-imposed techn(olog)ical immaturity.

Tools to the people

Giving the tools back to the people and re-imbuing things with the capacity to be repaired may, at first sight, seem to have a technoskeptical feel to it. However, the implying DIY and low-tech approach is often not primarily aimed against technology itself but furthers the wish to decommodify the social relationships that are embedded in production. According to Polanyi, the commodity character of the social constitutes the core problem of the current system: “Machine production in a commercial society involves, in effect, no less a transformation than that of the natural and human substance of society into commodities.”¹⁷ This development has led us into a cul-de-sac, from which we can liberate ourselves by realizing that we have fallen for a false consciousness: “But labor, land, and money are obviously not commodities; the postulate that anything that is bought and sold must have been produced for sale is emphatically untrue in regard to them.”¹⁸ It is no coincidence that many repair-based approaches focusing on forms of empowerment place at the center of their struggle the relationship to labor, to the soil, and to money.

“Tools to the people” thus actually means the empowerment of people. Leggewie and Bertling, in their contribution on “Open Source and DIY as a Post-capitalist Praxis,” also home in on this notion. That is why knowledge and tools are at the center of The Great Repair. However, in order to devise or reappropriate new-old tools, we must first question our existing base of knowledge, our epistemological fundamentals—and recognize that we have repressed, marginalized, and lost a whole raft of knowledge worlds and ways of relating to the world in the name of progress. This loss includes the knowledge about sustainable material extraction, building techniques, and land use; not to mention the associated experience with different forms of managing the commons. In this regard, the process of repair also leads to a new understanding of territory and of laws as specific governance instruments through which our (presently unequal and unjust) socio-ecological systems are reproduced. In light of the disastrous ecological, political, social, and economic consequences of this narrative of progress, we urgently need an alternative one. Repair as the counterstrategy to obsolescence could at least contribute to slowing down the engine of progress with its logic of perpetual destruction and reconstruction.¹⁹

Seen from this angle, the concept of repair must be defended time and again against the erroneous ideal of an anachronistic return to either pre-industrial economies or to some purported “natural” state. Since at least the publication of the Club of Rome report on the Limits to Growth exactly 50 years ago we know that we cannot rewind the clock. By confusing the observed limits to growth with the causes of the climate crisis, however, neo-Malthusian worldviews arise today, effectively leveraged against the development of the Global South. For example, historical geographer Jason W. Moore points out that a comprehensive redesigning of global nature began long before the invention of the steam engine with the early modern conquest of new territories by the nascent European empires. According to Moore, this increase in production in the web of life hinged on the notion of the “Great Frontiers” and the colonial practices of expansion, appropriation, and the exploitation for production of cheap nature inextricably bound up with it. The paradigm of the Great Repair is therefore, as stated, not aimed against technology per se, but against technology as a means of reproducing inequality and of exploiting the nonhuman world at both the planetary and local levels.

Repair and reparation

Against the backdrop of centuries of exploitation of cheap nature and cheap labor in the Global South, repair on a planetary scale cannot ignore the concept of reparations. Even if the social and ecological damage already inflicted is irreparable, we can still seek climate justice in the sense of recognizing responsibility and trying to find a way by which those who have hitherto profited from the climate-damaging economic system compensate those who are most affected by its impacts. The “Loss and Damage Fund” for poorer countries agreed to at the COP27 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, despite the conference’s failure as a whole, is a first step to creating a mechanism of reparations. In this context, reparations for climate damage are only one example of the much-needed processes of decolonization. The Great Repair seeks not only to decommodify social relations of production, as outlined above, but above all to decolonize social relations, ­including social institutions, enacting a more extensive form of decolonial reparations. The concept of reparations tends to be used in the context of reparations for war damage. The party that bears responsibility for the war and then loses it must, as a rule, make reparations payments. However, Lipp points out that the categories get mixed up in the context of sustainability:

The concept of ‘repair’ is related to the martial notion of reparation. […] The losers have to pay. However, paradoxically, and new in the history of reparations, there is no winner. The reparations affect everyone. The currency they are due in is called ‘repair.’²⁰

Politics for the repair society

We must, however, be careful not to take repair as an absolute value. It only has a social impact as a ­political category that embraces both action and negotiation at once. What needs to be repaired, how, and with what tools? What state do we aim to achieve? While fully aware of the open-ended character of the following list, we define six politics as the parameters for this open process of negotiation which, from our viewpoint, should structure the actions of a repair society.

Sufficiency

Given the rift between ambition and action, sufficiency is becoming ever more vital. By nature, however, the green-tech ideology ignores it. Sufficiency is not the opposite of efficiency. Instead, it describes the vision of a material culture in which humanity—and in particular the Global North—has to get by with less: less energy, fewer resources, less use of land, instead using what is already there more carefully. It is therefore at the opposing end of a logic of planetary material extraction and long supply chains fueling the construction industry. Sufficiency should also not be confused with austerity, which entails a reduction in a personal lifestyle borne by the marginalized members of society. Rather, it is construed as a paradigm of social planning and governance controlling the design of the built and unbuilt environment in such a way as to enable a life that is sufficient. What is decisive here is also reterritorialization, meaning the embedding 
of production and supply chains in regional and local contexts.

Longevity

In contrast to sustainability, which today primarily means transposing economic principles onto ecology, longevity focuses on extending the lifeline and life cycles of materials, objects, and technologies for 
as long as possible. In this context, recycling functions merely as the grease for an unchallenged productive system, whereas repair aims to ensure the longevity of things. The right-to-repair movement is making an ­important contribution to the design discourse by combatting throwaway culture and built-in obsolescence. At the same time, the reality of increasing migration, in particular the forced migration of climate refugees, demonstrates the need to rethink the impermanence and the mobility of architecture and settlement areas. Longevity is not the opposite of lightness and flexibility.

Care

Repair involves not only repairing things, but also caring for people, for nonhuman creatures, and for ecosystems. It requires that hitherto invisible labor 
be recognized. This includes the so far externalized costs of domestic and reproductive labor, as well 
as the labor of nature. On the basis of this expanded understanding, “ecosystems of repair,” spanning a network of human and nonhuman relationships, can be created.

Reappropriation

Racist and colonial violence—both of a territorial and of a cultural kind—is an indispensable precondition of the capitalist production of cheap nature in the Global North and in the Global South. No climate discourse is therefore possible without its consideration. Practices of repair must thus factor in decolonial reappropriation of the stolen and devalued objects, places, territories, cultural practices, and epistemes.

Solidarity

The politics of solidarity are at the very center of 
a multiplicity of practices of repair. Here, repair is understood as a social act that promotes coexistence, communal work, social forms of ownership, commonwealth economies, and risk sharing. The focus is on the local, city, or community level, often beyond the domain of the market and the state. Researching and strengthening smaller collaborative structures and economies contributes to their increasing robustness, for example regarding the shared use of resources 
and adaptation to climate change.

Plurality

In the endeavor to decommodify and decolonialize social relationships, the repair society questions the one-sidedness of techno-scientific rationality and aspires for plurality instead. This in particular means the endeavor to pluralize knowledge production outside the state- and market-validated knowledge cycles, opening them up to different systems of knowing and making. This includes practices that are based 
on Indigenous, crafts, or bricoleur-like knowledge and solve problems with the resources available. This way, expert knowledge is cast into question and the constellation of actors changed. Instead of emphasizing novelty and individual origination, plurality focuses 
on collaborative forms of knowledge production and self-empowerment.

Acknowledgments

The project would not have had such depth without the support and trust of Akademie der Künste, Berlin, in particular of Johannes Odenthal, its former Program Director, and his successor, Johanna M. Keller. Our sincere thanks go to all our funding partners, in particular the German Federal Cultural Foundation and Wüsten-
rot Stiftung, all the authors, artists, and not least our colleagues Marija Marić and Nazlı Tümerdem, as well as the ARCH+ team, in particular Nora Dünser and Felix Hofmann.

We would like to express our profound gratitude to Hortensia Völckers. Without her courage and her vision of culture as a social challenge, we would not have been able to realize such ambitious research, discourse, and exhibition projects as projekt bauhaus, Cohabitation, or The Great Repair during her time in office as Artistic ­Director of the German Federal Cultural Foundation