VIRTUAL Barcelona
Abstract
In this paper we sketch-out community economies of reuse and repair to address questions of scale and agency posed by the track titled Community Design & User Autonomy. With a focus on community-led activities in two local government areas, the paper identifies plural economies of material circulation alive in social practices of reuse, repair and share in western Sydney, aligning with national, state and local government agendas to move to a circular economy as integral to the sustainable future of Australian cities. We propose that amongst the first tasks in the transition to a circular economy is creating a ‘repair commons’ that includes the contribution of local civic society. Drawing on two studies exploring cultures of repair and community waste practices in culturally diverse and rapidly transforming urban areas of western Sydney we show that transition means a recalibration of the relationship between governments and communities, and a renegotiation of responsibilities for managing household waste. Employing a community economies lens, our vignette of a community of repair commoners is enabled by an ‘identikit’ of a locality transformed by possibilities of remaking from the already made. We intend to enact the ‘transformative thinking’ that Miller and Gibson-Graham (2019) call for in making other possibilities visible in the midst of the world we have now. The session offers a provocation to consider how our picture of a repair commons generates an alternative scalar imaginary, with potential to contribute to urban planning which prioritises a shared civic responsibility for material culture.
Dr Alison Gill is a design educator and researcher in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University, Sydney, Australia. She is the co-editor of Design/Repair: Place, Practice and Community (2023), and co-editor of a special issue of Journal of Design Research (2015) on design and social practice theory. She has authored “Jacques Derrida: Fashion under erasure” (in Thinking Through Fashion, Bloomsbury, revised edition forthcoming in 2024) and co-authored a chapter in Right Research: Modelling Sustainable Research Practices in the Anthropocene (2021). Her articles
Professor Abby Mellick Lopes is a social design researcher and educator in the School of Design, Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building at the University of Technology, Sydney. She is a chief investigator on two Australian Research Council (ARC) projects, one investigating innovative waste economies and the other an action research project exploring the concept of ‘climate-readiness’ with providers and residents in social housing. She publishes on sustainable design, social innovation and diverse economies and most recently co-edited and contributed to the book Design/Repair: Place, Practice and Community (2023). Abby is an adjunct at the School of Humanities and Communication Arts, Western Sydney University and a Research Associate at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University.