The Art of RepairAvailable now

About this book

In an age of repair cafés and right-to-repair campaigns, why did the everyday practice of mending nearly disappear? The Art of Repair offers the first sustained historical and philosophical account of repair’s twentieth-century decline. While technology and economics played important roles, the deeper cause lies in a profound cultural shift: the devaluation of durability, manual competence, and our ongoing relationship with the physical world. Drawing on material culture history, phenomenology, and critiques of consumer society, this book reconstructs the world in which repair was ordinary competence—transmitted through guilds, households, and apprenticeships—and examines how planned obsolescence, sealed design, educational deskilling, and the elevation of novelty over stewardship made replacement the default response to breakage. It traces the environmental, experiential, and ethical costs of that shift and considers what contemporary revival efforts, from grassroots repair spaces to legislative campaigns, reveal about a residual hunger for material engagement. Neither a nostalgic call to return to the past nor a purely technical manual, The Art of Repair argues that mending is a practice of attention and care with the power to restore both objects and our relation to them. Essential reading for anyone interested in the history of technology, material culture, sustainability, and the quiet politics of everyday life. Seven