Study Architecture 
ProPEL 
Author(s): Cynthia Deng & Elif Erez-Henderson
If every region and neighborhood has a distinctive ‘repair ecology’ (as coined by scholar Steven Jackson) or local system of repair, improvisation, and material recirculation, we posit that these repair ecologies are crucial forms of infrastructure for a non-extractive future. Repair is multiscalar: it includes the repair of physical objects and structural repair, but also goes beyond the physical to include reparations, abolition, rematriation of land, repair of relationships and historical narratives, disciplinary and ecological repair. ‘Repair’ does not seek to restore past conditions, but adapts to future worlds — it is a transformative act of care in the orientation of repairing forward. ‘Repair ecologies’ include place-based circularity and solidarity practices involving material exchange or revaluation. These practices comprise a neighborhood’s self-organized network of physical and social acts of mending. This paper compares the local repair ecologies of three case studies in diverse cultural contexts: Hamden in northeastern US, Querétaro in central Mexico, and the California Bay Area of the US. For each, we will show the results of fieldwork that highlight the particularity and the potentials of each locale’s repair ecology. Complex bottom-up people-based infrastructures (of care and repair) are unique to their place and context. In the case of Querétaro, existing everyday practices are sites of distributed creativity. The Bay Area includes the largest reuse organization and network of warehouse infrastructures in the US. Hamden is home to smaller dispersed networks of material exchange. The paper draws comparisons between shared issues and challenges as well as disparate relationships to local material flows and to local political institutions and legal ecosystems. From the comparison emerges speculations on ways in which local repair ecology infrastructure might be recognized, supported, and resourced through mechanisms and frameworks with a level of granular specificity rather than through universal best practices. Recent legislation opens potentials for considering local repair ecologies as infrastructure. The 2021 US Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act authorized $1.2 trillion for various infrastructure projects. While most funding went to physical infrastructure, movements fought to include care workers as part of the definition of infrastructure, broadening the understanding of crucial societal systems and services and highlighting the importance of less tangible infrastructures. We argue that local repair ecologies are a form of care infrastructure that can upend extractive relationships with the earth and local communities. This paper calls for recognizing and resourcing local repair ecologies as essential infrastructures for non-extractive and reparative futures.
https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.113.83
Volume Editors
Sara Jensen Carr & Rubén García Rubio
ISBN
978-1-944214-48-7
