1. Labour Power in the Repair Shop

Dr Valeria Graziano (Research Fellow, Centre for Advanced Studies, University of Rijeka) — valeria.a.graziano@gmail.com

Dr Kim Trogal (Reader in Social and Political Design, Canterbury School of Architecture, University for the Creative Arts) — KTrogal@ucreative.ac.uk

1.1. Abstract

This paper presents the findings of comparative research into the labor, organizational and spatial practices of a new kind of hybrid civic spaces that we refer to as ‘social impact-driven repair shops.’ These are an emerging typology of urban spaces dedicated to repaired and up-cycled items that also go beyond the functions of a traditional shop. Significantly, these shops are run not purely for economic reasons, but rather to position themselves as local, socio-political interventions aiming to confront the environmental impacts of waste, support ethical and affordable consumption, alongside providing new opportunities for employment. We focused our fieldwork (2017-2019) on three such ‘repair shops’: ReTuna Återbruksgalleria in Sweden, The Loop in the United Kingdom and RiMaflow in Italy. We discuss the differing labor and spatial practices taking place within each while highlighting some of the tensions that emerge, and the implications for some of the wider debates in repair studies, ‘green work’ and circular economies. We conclude by identifying two divergent and potentially antagonistic circuits of repair which we name ‘repair as solidarity’ and ‘repair as poor economy’, which we propose as a lens to better grasp the different logics underpinning the transition to circular economies.

Key words: labor, repair, repair shop, solidarity economy, spatial practice.

1.2. Introduction

In this paper we explore three ‘social impact-driven repair shops’, which we will subsequently refer to as ‘repair shops’. These are shops that trade repaired and restored goods from furniture and white goods, to textiles and electronics, while at the same time engaging in broader socio-political interventions in their locales, such as workshops, public events, repair cafes and convivial events for their surrounding communities. Significantly, as a new type of civic urban space, these shops are run not purely for economic reasons, but rather to position themselves as locally-rooted, socio-political interventions aiming to confront the environmental impacts of waste, support ethical and affordable consumption, alongside providing new opportunities for employment in a more sustainable economy. These initiatives range in organizational type from cooperatives to charities, to social enterprises, to for-profit companies, including in one instance an occupied factory, each involving a diverse range of constituencies and stakeholders. While their juridical statuses might be diverse, a common characteristic is the articulation of the civic dimension of their retail activities as a stated rationale, an approach that highlights social well-being rather than profit motives.

These repair shops constitute one of the most significant new organizational formats within what recently has been discussed as “repair as a ’new social movement’”, that is set to promote “the technical empowerment of citizens, ‘convivialism’ and sustainability” (library⁄(Krebs and Weber, 2021, 28)) committing to a ‘do-it-together’ ethics and to a “post-capitalist practice” (Baier et al., cited in ibid.). While all of these initiatives would fit with a broadly defined ‘green’ agenda, our research highlights how the differing organizations can disclose a wide range of regimes of practice (library⁄(Graziano and Trogal 2019)). Our hypothesis is that the practices found in these new repair shops are situated at the juncture of two intersecting yet potentially antagonistic circuits of repair: ‘repair as solidarity’ describes those practices that aim to strengthen participants livelihoods and collective capacities, while ‘repair as poor economy’ describes organizational mechanisms that re-entrench existing inequalities through the way they involve participants and perpetuate the appearance of affluent consumerism and the myth of full employment.

In the following pages we will explore each of these tendencies via three case studies, which we will approach with an analytical framework that combines a reflection on their labor relations and their spatial practices. While labor and space are often analysed separately (library⁄(Heiland, 2021)), we suggest that both are crucial sites for understanding the neoliberal tendencies of ‘green’ initiatives, and exploring them jointly allows for a more nuanced understanding of what a ‘post-capitalist’ regime of practice might entail in its multiple entanglements of relations and materialities.

The article is organized into two parts. In the first one, we present the three cases. We focused our fieldwork (2017-2019) on three ‘repair shops’: ReTuna Återbruksgalleria in Sweden, The Loop in the United Kingdom and RiMaflow in Italy, as they embody three distinctive approaches to the organization of labor and space, with implications for the practices of consumption and the relation with the surrounding constituencies. Our presentation of each site is based on visits, observations and interviews with site managers, workers and store owners conducted between 2017-19. In part two, we discuss the differing labor and spatial practices taking place. We aim to highlight some of the tensions that emerge and point to the implications for some of the wider debates in repair studies, ‘green work’ and circular economies. We conclude with an elaboration of ‘repair as solidarity’ and ‘repair as poor economy’ as a methodological lens to help grasp the different logics underpinning the transition to circular economies.

1.3. Part One: Three Repair Shops

1.3.1. ReTuna Återbruksgalleria, Eskilstuna, SE

ReTuna is located next to a recycling facility on the outskirts of Eskilstuna, a former industrial town west of Stockholm, which we visited in 2018. The mall officially opened in August 2015 and promotes itself as a place where every item on sale has been reused, repaired, recycled or has been, in their words “organically or sustainably produced” (ReTuna n.d.). ReTuna is a private company set up by Eskilstuna Energy and Environment, established by two neighbouring municipalities: Eskilstuna and Strängnäs.

The project prides itself in being ‘a mall like any other’ and the managers we met consciously embraced the commercial logic of the project, prizing its financial sustainability, which is achieved via a composite approach. From an economic perspective, ReTuna can be seen firstly as a landlord who rents space to private business, mainly (but not exclusively) to small, single owner shops. At the time of visiting there were 14 retail units, each rented at around $1800 per month. To set up a business in ReTuna, the business plan must show social and ecological responsibility in order to be considered. The shops active during our visit sold items such as clothing, furniture, computer equipment and electronics, household building supplies, sportswear and equipment, flowers and home decorations, and a cafe. The shops are mostly locally-owned, but also included one charity shop of a more established organization, Stockholms Stads Mission.

A second source of direct income comes from venue rental of a dedicated hall for conventions and conferences, which at the time of our visit was used to run a regular cinema evening. Finally, there was one non-commercial renter, a school for adult and life-long education, which is free and publicly run in Sweden, who offer classes in creative skills, with students learning by repurposing and upcycling a range of objects and textiles.

There are other indirect ways that ReTuna makes itself financially sustainable, as its workings are implicated in other infrastructural arrangements.

First, the mall is located alongside the municipal waste processing. Large containers are arranged around a vast parking area just outside the mall building, where local inhabitants drive through to drop off their unwanted goods. These containers are clearly labelled for different types of materials (white goods, wooden objects, textiles and clothes, etc.), all of which are then examined and pre-sorted by a team of workers based in a warehouse on the ground floor. Those items deemed good enough are made available for the shop owners, who are able to visit the warehouse at their leisure, to choose those items they would like to claim and resell. The relationship between landlord and shop owners is complicated by ReTuna also acting as the main supplier for the shops, granting them exclusive rights to the ‘donated’ goods on the condition that shop owners must guarantee to sell them on site. This arrangement is not popular with some of the shop owners and workers, as it prevents them from selling goods online or in secondary shops more centrally located. This arrangement, from the perspective of the mall’s management, was necessary to protect its capacity to generate profit by keeping the value onsite. However, it places a strain on the already small margins of some of the shops, shifting financial risk to individual businesses away from the local government-owned enterprise. We were told that a children’s store had recently closed as it did not manage to generate enough profit, for instance.

A second indirect economy sustaining the mall involves the status of the laborers on site. ReTuna presents an array of modalities of employment. At the time of our visit, Eskilstuna Energy and Environment directly employed 13 people who deal with waste processing, and ReTuna employed 7 people, including those who run the facility, staff who manage the cafe and one of the retail units they operate themselves. During our interview with the managers, these were the only workers introduced to us as ‘staff.’ However, more people are visible working in and around the mall, such as the individual shop owners. Then, the retail staff is composed of both paid and unpaid workforce. Some shops are supported by volunteers, mainly elderly people. Others are instead asylum seekers who are supported through the Migration Agency employment scheme. Other workers on site include long-term unemployed people who are sent to ReTuna through the workfare-like scheme run by the Arbetsförmedlingen (the Swedish Public Employment Service), receiving state-subsidised wages. Both of these last two schemes offer positions that are contractually limited, allowing individuals to take up work at the mall for a few months only, after which the position is made available to someone else.

1.3.2. The Loop, London Boroughs of Hackney and Barnet, UK

The Loops, set up between 2014 and 2017, was originally conceived of as five community reuse projects, each based on a different housing estate across five different London boroughs. The project began as part of a larger research project funded by European Commission’s LIFE+ Programme and co-financed by three housing associations (Peabody, Genesis Housing, the Southern Housing Group¹) and two local councils (Islington and Hammersmith & Fulham), and is undertaken by a partnership between the federation of charities Groundwork London, the London Community Reuse Network and Middlesex University (Repurpose 2022). At the time of writing, the Loop comprises two of the original sites, with local repair and reuse projects at the Pembury Estate in Hackney, and in the The Grahame Park Estate in Barnet. The two centres are funded by a range of agencies who support marginalised groups (including homeless people, asylum seekers and children). The centres are now called Community Reuse Hubs and are part of the UK-wide national ‘Reuse Network.’ While both have shop fronts and trade is part of their economies, they are founded as not-for-profit organizations, and thus any money they raise is reinvested in the workshop and in training opportunities for workers. We visited both hubs in 2017, and we had the opportunity to discuss the project with Groundwork’s programme manager for Grahame Park and the Re-use coordinator, two shop managers as well as to entertain more informal conversations with a number of volunteers.

The Loop project’s stated main aim is to reduce the problem of fly-tipping² on each estate, reducing the amount of material sent to the landfill. By encouraging the refurbishment and reuse of household items, particularly furniture, the project also wants to increase the skills of residents, “helping to address levels of deprivation and employability linked to poor levels of environmental quality” (Groundwork London 2017a, 2). A third concern is to address the lack of strategic policy in household reuse and waste, with mainstream local authorities and commercial waste collectors not addressing environmental and social issues, which in turn are left to third sector organizations and SMEs (Groundwork London 2017b, 4).

The need for affordable furniture on these estates and the high incidence of fly-tipping reflects the high turnover of low-income and vulnerable tenants, who in struggling to keep up with rent payments are frequently evicted. When new accommodations are secured, many struggle to afford furniture and other essential household items (Groundwork London 2017a, 10). As at ReTuna, local residents of the estate are encouraged to donate unwanted furniture and small household items such as kitchenware, textiles, electric appliances to the project, rather than dumping them on public grounds in the estates. The Loop promotes this by offering free collection of bulky items to residents, to then repair, restore or upcycle them in workshops also located on the estate. The Loop then sells donated and refurbished items in its shops, with one shop located on each estate. The repair and refurbishing work is coordinated by the shop managers, but is carried out by volunteers. At the time of our visit to Grahame Park, volunteers included local retired residents with pre-existing skills in relevant crafts such as carpentry, who also acted as trainers for less experienced volunteers. More recently, the Loop offers free courses in a variety of skills, including upholstery, painting, using power tools and DIY/ home improvement skills, as well as weekly “mend-and-fix” sessions.

After three years, the project reported that reuse of household furniture and goods on the estates had increased and that 102 tonnes of waste had been removed from the waste stream (Groundwork London 2017a, 9). Alongside the environmental benefits, the project emphasised the social and economic benefits of providing affordable furniture for low-income residents (with over 3600 items of furniture sold to such constituency), as well as providing an increase in capacity and skills of residents, creating 19 jobs and involving 65 volunteers (ibid., 8).

1.3.3. RiMaflow, Milan, IT

The third site we visited (summer 2018) is RiMaflow, a workers’ managed factory plant in the north of Italy. In December 2012, a group of about twenty workers decided to occupy the factory Maflow, which since the 1970s was an automotive parts factory working for major clients such as BMW and Fiat. In 2009, the factory had 320 workers and was profitable, yet it was sold to the company Boryszew. After benefitting from public money in support of full occupation, Boryszew decided to delocalise production to Poland, taking all the expensive industrial machinery with them. The workers refused the option of the ‘workers buy out’ that was made available to them by the owner, as this would have put them into severe debt³. “Why pay to work?,” they aptly asked and decided instead to occupy the factory site, by then an empty industrial area of about 28,000 square meters comprising several hangars and buildings - and to use their skills to turn it into a site dedicated to the recycling, repair and selling of electrical and electronic equipment.

RiMaflow had been operating in a state of suspension between legality and illegality as the new property owner, Unicredit Leasing, entered a long legal dispute with the company Virum, who also claimed some rights over the site. The situation changed in 2019, when Rimaflow workers reached an agreement with the authorities and agreed to relocate. In the meantime, however, RiMaflow’s workers had been struggling to see their use of the facilities for the creation of a sustainable local economy recognised by local and national politicians, who could intervene in the process of redestination of the site.

The workers organised themselves through two legal entities. Occupy Maflow Association, which takes its name from the global movement, coordinates all the activities that take place within the site, while the RiMaflow Cooperative Enterprise deals with reuse and recycling. At the time of our visit there were about 90 people working at RiMaflow, alongside a number of independent craft workers who were later granted workshop spaces within the plant.

Interestingly, RiMaflow workers started their activities with the repairing and recycling of goods, being able to count upon a number of in-house skills (and in the absence of industrial machinery). At the start, the core business of this “recuperated factory,” as the workers call their business, was going to be the sale and repair of electronic and white goods, such as fridges and washing machines. However, this second idea was slowly given up due to the extreme difficulty of complying with the regulations disciplining the sector. Pallet repair is another of Rimaflow’s activities, where they offer their products as “ethically created” pallets, in conscious contrast to the majority of companies that repair pallets who use unregulated, low-paid labor (library⁄(Forno and Graziano 2019, 16)).

For RiMaflow, as at ReTuna, the financial model had to embrace a diversification of activities, rather than being centred solely on repair, upcycling and recycling. At the time of our visit activities included a retail space for selling food produced by other cooperatives; the production of their own liquor in cooperation with a museum of partisanship in Tuscany; a cafe/bar; a rehearsal space for music bands; a service for furniture removal, which also feeds the repair activities; a plant that recycles wallpaper, separating paper from plastic; a garage for campervans and trailers; and about other 35 independent workshops of artisans and makers. RiMaflow also hosts concerts, debates, lectures, and art projects in an ongoing effort to keep their local constituencies engaged with the status and destiny of the former factory. Migrants and refugees also find employment at RiMaflow. They are part of the broader collective and some of them autonomously manage the shipping of containers of recycled goods through the networks they maintain with their countries of origin.

Within RiMaflow, profits are redistributed across all the members of the cooperative. Moreover, all decisions are taken via collective assembly. They say:

We want to spread a new way to conceive the production activities. An idea centred on workers self-management, the highest level of ecological sustainability achievable and the involvement of the local communities with the factory activities. (Interview with authors, 2018).

RiMaflow’s approach could be described as embracing a tactic of “conflictual mutualism” (library⁄(Bertell 2019)), where disobedient actions and anti-capitalist critiques are intertwined with the quest for financial sustainability and job security that guarantees a degree of autonomy and empowerment to members. This ethos is exemplified, for instance, by the terms chosen to name the different operations at the plant, such as Fuori Mercato (“Out of the Market”), to refer to the network of agricultural producers, mostly from the South, who distributed their products via RiMaflow; or Cittadella dell’Altra Economia (“Citadel for the alter-economy”), to name the indoor market space for artisanal, repaired and second-hand goods.

1.4. Part Two: Labour and Spatial Practices

At first glance each of the sites can be seen in alignment with similar initiatives, in that they locate their raison d’etre in two main social values: 1. Their role in reducing consumption, participating in a loosely defined ‘green economy’; and 2. their role in creating jobs. However, it became increasingly clear that there were significant differences in the political commitments expressed by their setups, as well as a number of fissures between the stated values, aims and objectives of the initiatives and how their day-to-day operations were run. We look at these divergences from the perspective of labor and of space.

1.4.1. Labor in the Repair Shops

Differences in the organization and valorization of labor are striking across the three repair shops we have examined. In both ReTuna and The Loop there seems to be a significant contradiction between the emphasis on training people’s skills in order to make them more “employable” and an organizational model which relies on a revolving mix of volunteers, unemployed, refugees and temporary workers who are publicly subsidized laborers. Moreover, these constituencies, as much as the learners, have little impact on the organizational structure in which they dwell.

The business model of ReTuna largely relies on both the initiative and risk taking of local small entrepreneurs, and labor which is subsidized via the public sector and arranged according to the principles of workfare. What this means is that the long term unemployed are sent to work there in return for their social benefits and asylum seekers are sent there while they are unallowed to seek gainful employment elsewhere. In ReTuna, shop managers we talked to explained with some pride that participants on those schemes get training in retail, customer service, the Swedish language (where this applies), and generally saw the experience as enabling those people to become more employable. Yet both of these schemes are designed to be temporary, preventing their development of more stable ties with the rest of the staff, who in fact did not appear to count these two groups of workers in their numbers. Temporary workers from the schemes were not supported in developing more technical skills connected with the repair cycle and indeed it was remarkable to notice how little of that kind of ‘hard skilled’ work went on at ReTuna. The abundance of items made it less appealing for the centre to invest in more extensive repair activities, so only items in better condition were selected for resale. We found a disquieting lack of reflexivity surrounding a striking juxtaposition of brown bodies, unemployed bodies, poor bodies, older bodies - bodies who in many different ways carry marks of social stigma - with what is effectively trash. Considering the politics of such proximities instead could complicate the storytelling around values being embraced and generated at ReTuna.

Employability was also at the centre of The Loop’s social mission, however here too much of the repair was carried out by volunteers, often retirees, who already possessed the necessary skills. While their presence was a positive sign of the cross-generational integration within the project, it can hardly be seen as a model when it comes to re-imagining the future of repair, as it does not provide these processes with a stable pedagogical framework for ensuring the learning of more advanced skill sets.⁴

In contrast, RiMaflow’s approach to labor relations seeks to ‘repair’ the unjust conditions faced by its constituents. Their chosen organizational structure redistributes the generated profits among members and wants to undo divisions linked to social status and skill proficiency. While the repairing of white goods was initially a last resort taken in reaction to a severe lack of economic alternatives, the internal processes that led to a diverse range of activities related to recycling speaks of an organizational vision that embraced repair work as part of a broader attempt to politicise consumer relations with producers, as well as products. Revealingly, the core group of the cooperative are workers who shared a very strong experience of unionization and struggles.

Within the spectrum of political positions, the specific modalities in which repair labor could be reorganized, under which conditions and through which organizational tools, merit further consideration. Repair, alongside many other “climate jobs” (Neale 2021), can all be co-opted to serve a political horizon that, while presenting as more eco-compatible, would still fall short of an emancipatory and sustainable potential.

The different ways repair labor is organized across the three case studies have some lessons and insights for the wider debates around work and the green economy as well as for the ‘repair movement,’ which comprises a host of initiatives and campaigns advocating for reforms to enable independent repair. Since the 2010s, an international movement campaigning for the ‘rights to repair’ has been gaining momentum. Its main focus is to lobby legislators to prevent planned obsolescence and the monopolization of the aftermarkets of products⁵. Their public advocacy highlights both the environmental impact of repair, and its “social value” in its capacity to create new ‘jobs.’ The predominant framework deployed can be described as Neo-Keynesian, where independent repair shops are often invoked as a crucial contribution to local economies, as a form of labor that is immune to off-shoring. In the US-based Repair Association petition to the Federal Trade Commission, we find a direct incitement to “defend local repair jobs – the corner mom-and-pop repair shops that keep getting squeezed out” (U.S. PIRG, Repair.org and iFixit, n.d.). In their policy objectives, the campaign states the goal of “creating an economy around extending the lifespan of manufactured goods will create jobs and benefit the environment” (Repair Association n.d.). The Restart Project’ petition to the UK government also explains that the right to repair is “relevant to consumer rights, market competition, taxation, job creation. But also the environment and a green recovery” (The Restart Project n.d.). Similarly, Right to Repair Europe, a coalition of European repair organizations, note that while with specific pro-repair policies the turnover for producers of new products would decrease, there would be “very limited job losses in Europe [as] the production of consumer goods often takes place outside Europe. A recent study found that repair creates 200 times more jobs than landfilling and incineration” (Right to Repair Europe, n.d.).

In proposing a direct link between job creation and environmental preservation, pro-repair campaigners rely on the assumption that is at the core of many “green new deal” (library⁄(Beuret, 2021)) approaches that are seeking reformist paths to address the ecological crisis while maintaining the economic premises of capitalist accumulation intact. Despite the foregrounding of employment opportunities as a social good intrinsic to repair, one must question the political conviction that keeps positioning work as the best way to redistribute social wealth, organized production, and more ambitiously, creating a society where everyone can lead a fulfilling life. While such advocates are arguing for the employment benefits of repair activities, when we consider the actual relations found in the three repair shops, it is clear that the question of labor is far from resolved in practice. Llorente-González and Vence (2020, 7) point out that in Europe, such labor intensive “circular activities” such as repair have both lower salaries than the average; that “labor intensity and the share of unpaid labor in total employment are more than 50% higher than those of the rest of the economic sectors” (ibid., 5) and “21% of workers in circular economy sectors in Europe receive no payment (ibid.).” Entrenched dimensions of precarity and deskilling are found beyond the European context in which our research is based. Castellini, for example, in her analysis of over 300 green job advertisements in Toronto, found that the highest sector of advertisements were for work in retail and consumption and that “the abundance of positions that do not require specialized environmental knowledge or competencies is remarkable” (library⁄(Castellini 2019, 67)). Her analysis revealed that by appealing to job applicants’ political beliefs and motivations, firms could retain motivated, skilled and productive workers while simultaneously normalizing unpaid work, “concealing the extent to which the presence of motivated cheap labor contributes to green businesses’ bottom line” (ibid.).

Studies of local environmental schemes in the Global South, such as the one by Benjamin Neimark, Sango Mahanty and their co-authors, deepen the understanding of precarity in green sectors to processes akin to what we call ‘poor economy.’ In their studies of projects in Kenya, Cambodia and the Philippines they found an emerging “eco-precariat,” a local labor force addressing “the volatile demands of an ever-expanding environmental service-based economy” (library⁄(Neimark et al., 2020, 496)). While lacking “formal recognition, conceptualization and appropriate compensation” (ibid., 497), they found that people’s participation in supposedly ecological projects actually divorced them from indigenous and local means of livelihood via processes that were meant to ‘reskill’ them.

These practices are illustrative of what David Pellow discussed as ’environmental inequality formation’ (library⁄(Pellow, 2000)): injustices that are “not always simply imposed unilaterally by one class of people on another” (2000, 589), but rather are actively formed through processes where multiple stakeholders hold changing and often contradictory interests and allegiances (ibid.) Here, intersecting social arrangements and systems of oppression become more insidious in the way stakeholders are atomised or divided (ibid., 597). This becomes particularly evident in labor arrangements where workers’ contracts are time-limited and they have little or no stake in the governance of a project. In understanding the formation of inequalities in the context of the broader ‘green economy’, it appears that labor is not only, as Castellini argues, a key site from which to understand the neoliberal character of some green sectors, but that labor is also being subsumed in different ways (library⁄Neimark et al., 2020). With the authors above, we found that repair labor as organized in the ‘shops’, alongside a large proportion of new kinds of ‘green collar work,’ or work that “mitigates environmental damage” (Pettinger 2017, 5), can participate in and reinforce economic ‘circuits’ underpinned by deeply different political horizons.

1.4.2. Shop Spaces

In parallel to the view that circular economies provide pathways to employment, circular economies are now taking a prominent role in urban development policy (library⁄Savini, 2019; Kębłowski et al., 2020; Petit-Boix and Leipold, 2018). In this context, circular economies are seen as a means for city regional growth (library⁄(Salvini 2019, 676)), increasing business opportunities and the productivity of urban areas (library⁄Prendeville et al., 2018). Yet the dominant formulations of ‘circularity’ in urban areas follow broader trends of the circular economy in policy and industry, namely they are apolitical in nature (Genovese and Pansera, 2021; Valenzuela & Böhm, 2017) and aligned “to a technocratic, eco-modernist agenda” (Genovese and Pansera, 2021, 2). As Kębłowski et al. (2020) note, a large part of the literature is dominated by perspectives from the Global North, and celebrates “best practice” and “showcase ‘circular’ cities” with little attention to the social realities. Their own work highlights the importance of understanding the spatiality of these new material circuits of reuse, recycling and sharing. When “‘circular’ practices are anchored in networks articulated at the neighbourhood level and beyond,” class-based exclusions occur. Given that the circular economy has been privileged within EU funding they note, it is therefore not surprising to see its increasing presence in the urban policies of city regions hit by austerity, namely those regions most seeking funding (ibid.; library⁄Bassens et al. 2020).

Bringing a more performative understanding of space here highlights how different economic ‘circuits’ are created or maintained beyond employment conditions. Where larger scale geographies (of resources distribution or territorial management) clearly have socially reproductive effects, such as Kębłowski, et al. (2020) raise, so do the everyday spatial practices, particularly in relation to consumption. In this conceptualization, space is not a ’neutral,’ cartesian container of objects of subjects, but rather is active, socially produced and reproductive⁶. To borrow Martina Low’s words, space can be conceptualized as “created in performative action by synthesizing and relationally ordering objects and people. This is enacted in pre-arranged spaces and happens in day-to-day activities with recourse to institutionalized orderings and spatial structures” (Low, 2008, 43).

What we find in the spatialities of the three repair shops is a number of tensions between the push and pull of neoliberal logics and consumerism, on one hand, and the desire for decommodified civic relations on the other. These tensions are evident not only when considering the geographical locations – all sites are based in somewhat marginal or peripheral contexts – but also by the way the shops engage in retail strategies.

The ReTuna mall in its peripheral location means this facility is under less commercial pressure than inner city sites, allowing the shops generous access to square meters. For a post-consumerist initiative that sees itself as contributing to a green economy, the space of the ‘shopping mall’ generates some contradictions. The mall format was chosen as a seemingly effective means to attract a broad customer base, without limiting its appeal to constituencies who are already accustomed to shopping ‘second hand,’ an approach that had the potential to quickly generate economic viability. From the perspective of aesthetics, ReTuna shops do indeed provide a different, more polished and curated experience that is more in line with mainstream retail strategies of display. Yet, this strategy can also become a limitation for a project that aims to reduce household waste. The space itself, in faithfully trying to “create a mall like any other” ultimately maintains an alignment with the values of shopping as a consumerist pastime, and following the model of an all-encompassing shopping experience mimicking public space under the auspices of a fully privatized space.

In the mall, a fast metabolic rhythm is necessary in order to support the entrepreneurial economic model based on rent. This leads to a paradoxical situation where, with the exception of the electronic store and some reconditioning of furniture, we found that surprisingly little repair activities took place. Shop owners mentioned that they had access to enough second-hand items that were in good enough condition to be immediately resold, and so had little incentive to repair more complex or damaged items. Some shop owners gave emphasis to a fast turnaround of goods, with one giving the example of a ‘sale day’ they organized regularly, with special discounts on sofas and armchairs. This was because these large items don’t sell very often and take up “a lot of space.” Such pressure to optimize space aligns with the reasoning of logistical capitalism, where any kind of stock that does not move quickly is seen as a burden.

In the Loop, we encountered a different spatial logic at play, yet one that is similarly indicative of the tension between competing values at play in the operations of the ‘repair shop.’ At the time of our visit, the Loop’s retail strategy was to sort their products into two categories. Items sold via an online marketplace tended to be higher quality goods (trendier, sturdier or more aesthetically pleasing). These were aimed at affluent clients from the urban middle class, enabling them to fetch higher prices than local residents on the estate might be able to afford. Those items sold in the local estate shop tended to include ’lower-end’ products sold at cheap prices, catering to more marginalized local residents with much more modest spending power.

The reason we were offered for such a strategy was that this project meets the complex financial pressure they are under. While retail units in London are in general highly pressured by real estate, those found within council estates can, to a certain extent, be offered with semi-controlled rental conditions. While this makes a hybrid initiative such as the Loop possible only in such a space as a council estate to begin with, this too hosts a number of tensions. As the project is conceived directly in and for the estate, it also tends to replicate the insularity that such built environments cast onto their inhabitants. For instance, the space of the Loop shop at the time of our visit presented as crammed with many objects and of not easy navigation for perusal or choice. When contrasted with the offers at ReTuna to mobilize aesthetic display techniques in order to orient desire in consumer spaces, the Loop offers a much more conventional atmosphere to the shopper, akin to those found in charity shops widely present through the UK.

Unlike the Loop, Rimaflow has access an abundance of space (but no other means of production), accessed in a rare, temporary conjuncture in which neither state nor capital had a strong interest in reclaiming land. Undoubtedly, the precariousness of the illegal status of the workers’ occupation was a strong motivation for RiMaflow to foster relationships with their surrounding territory seeking out, for instance, allies within local authorities and the church. Aside from tactical considerations, RiMaflow’s activists articulated a rejection of the logic of retail spaces and rather insisted that a crucial aim was “to repair the relation between workers and the village” (interview with the authors, 2018), which would be otherwise abandoned in more ways than simply economically. RiMaflow opened their space to a number of non-commercial activities, striving to engage visitors not as consumers, but as participants in a process of ‘co-production,’ a concept that is important among Rimaflow’s workers (as it emerged in our interviews; see also library⁄Forno and Graziano, 2019). They aim to enable people to see buying as more than shopping, but as an intervention in the life of a given constituency. Co-production is different from individual boycott and ‘buycott’ efforts, in that it refers to collective strategies used by organizations (or communities) rather than individuals, in order to develop direct relationships between the consumer and the producer.

This politicization of consumption stands out as being at odds with the strategy adopted at ReTuna, where the site’s managers and shop owners strived to reproduce a seamless shopping experience. On the other hand, RiMaflow has adopted strategies of inclusivity that are partially similar to those devised at The Loop, for example the visibility of the repair workshop physically disrupts the retail space, so it is not perceived as one of ‘pure consumption’. However, the two diverge where it comes to including a political analysis of poverty in their practice. In the Loop there is a remedial tendency to tend to the problems caused by austerity in estates, without the denunciation of injustice that is central to RiMaflow’s interest in repair as one of their core activities. Within this framework, one of the biggest liabilities of RiMaflow’s experimentations concerns their legal status, both in terms of the fragility of an occupation, but also the legislation surrounding the repair and refurbishment of white goods. The required standards were too complex to meet, for a workers’ cooperative not backed by financial investors and legal experts, and so the activity had to ultimately be discontinued.

1.4.3. Solidarity and Poor Economy in the Repair Shop

We identified two economic and political tendencies at play across the three case studies, which we name as ‘solidarity economy’ on the one hand and ‘poor economy’ on the other. The term ‘poor economy’, as we use it here, gestures towards a set of practices beyond those of precarious labor or welfare, to see these arrangements as situated within wider economic circuits. As such, they encompass and intersect with other practices such as, in the case of repair shops, consumption, volunteering, informal adult education, sociality, governance of migration and the mutation of welfare into workfare.

We want to draw attention to how some of the rationales and politics at play in how the repair shops organize both labor and space in ways that contribute to a ‘poor economy.’ While circular economy projects have been put forward as a means to resolve the dual crisis of resource scarcity and the crisis of cities’ economic growth, the labor practices of the case studies need to be understood as intersecting with their spatial contexts at more local or neighbourhood scales. Working with an understanding of poverty that is not only linked to income, but “linked to a network of social exclusions in various spheres of life (e.g., health, political representation, culture, education, etc.)” (library⁄(Oosterlynck et al, 2013)), the way the projects intersect with already existing material levels of wealth, the availability (or not) of services and infrastructures, as well as capacities for participants to self-determine their role in the projects is, therefore, crucial. While in the cases discussed their spatial marginality in no way represents the more extreme forms of spatial segregation (such as those found more commonly in the US, for instance, as examined by Wacquant 2004), the creeping accumulation of practices which bifurcate society and its material resources, nonetheless display a tendency to consolidate in localities.

Repair and maintenance labor can in such contexts could also be described as part of what historians of welfare called “a culture of makeshifts.”⁷ Ethnographic studies demonstrate how the material realities of repair labor are sustained via informal networks, often with a heavy reliance on pirated information and/or improvised performances (Houston 2017; Hencke 1999; Strebel et. al. 2018). Practices that tend towards a ‘poor economy’, as we try to frame it here, are not simply “cultures of poverty” but rather can be seen to constitute the management of such cultures. As these ‘repair shops’ strive to find a legitimate social role, there is a significant question in how they can support these practices to address social injustices, rather than replicating regimes of exclusion that are embedded in the historical genealogy of welfare.

Across the constituencies engaged in the three repair shops, we also encountered modes of conduct that could be best grasped as a commitment to the counter-economic circuits of a maturing ‘solidarity economy.’ While this latter term emerges from a long tradition of social organizing/mobilizing economic solidarity since the 1930s, more recently the ‘solidarity economy’ has become a label for a transnational movement characterized by the attempt to create a non-sectarian network of economic initiatives uniting those who are anti-market (communist wing) and those who are anti-state, libertarian wing (library⁄Miller 2015). Proponents of this paradigm insist on connecting humane (meaningful work, good conditions of employment, etc.) and natural processes (sustainable production, green energies, etc.); focused on scaling and creating circuits between different nodes (library⁄(Kawano, Masterson & Teller-Elsberg, 2009)). While we don’t want to suggest the above examples are part of this movement, we took this term to express a commitment to the redistribution of power and surplus as part of a process of socio-political ‘repair.’ Within these debates, and particularly relevant here, is the advocacy of a specific approach that would recommend the “liberation from (waged) work” as a guiding principle (Barca 2019, 175).

The lenses ‘poor economy’ and ‘solidarity economy’ represent for us a way to grasp the contradictions at play in the repair shops and to situate them in wider discussions concerning the future of our productive as well as consumptive destiny. Taken together, analysing labor relations and spatial practices, allow us to see how repair shops are inevitably entangled with the social reproduction of capital while they strive to prefigure different regimes of practice. On the one hand, we found a reliance on placement schemes for the unemployed and migrants seeking asylum status. On the other hand, we find a politicization of repair labor as a revaluation of non-productive activities and as a source of livelihood to be distributed via cooperative forms. Similarly, there are significant variations in the ways repair shops valorise and work with their locations and surroundings, ranging from practices that uncritically reproduce the consumptive labor of their ‘shoppers,’ to those that create an environment where people are encouraged to take up different roles vis-a-vis the use value of the goods available to be repaired.

The tendency we identify as ‘repair as poor economy’ encourages society to become and stay resilient in the face of dispossession and predation, in a perspective that is continuous with the tenets of neoliberal governance. The strategies that mobilize repair as solidarity, on the other hand, presented us with compelling attempts to forge sustainable circuits of social metabolism. The differentiation between repair practices that are organised in ways that strengthen a different politics of social reproduction and those who remain reactive, re-entrenching existing inequalities through the way they involve participants appear as crucial at this juncture. At stake are the ways that repair practices might ‘fix (or not) the shop’ and contribute to the rethinking of such hybrid retail spaces as a contemporary proposition that decommodifies (or not) objects and relations. What we propose can be learnt from these studies of discrete sites is that the concepts of repair as ‘solidarity’ or as ‘poor economy’, could be useful methodological lenses to help refine different logics underpinning the transition to circular economies.

1.5. Acknowledgments

This research was supported by an Internal Research Fund at the University for the Creative Arts, Canterbury, UK.

The authors report no conflict of interest in the subject matter or materials discussed in this manuscript.

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