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Repair Directory

Created: 2025-07-29 (13:38:40) — Modified: 2025-08-11 (20:38:57)
Status: in progress

Welcome to my repair directory!

This page was made for the 32-Bit Cafe Sites for Social Change code jam! The prompt for the jam is to create a webpage, blog post or standalone website showcasing a cause, its importance and how visitors can help!

In this spirit, the repair directory brings together different repair resources which are often dispersed and difficult to find. Right now it is not very extensive. It is a first version. I will add new entries over time!

I want to learn more about repair!
I need to repair something!

Why repair?

Repair possibly seems like an unusual thing to champion. Patching holes in clothes, replacing a cracked phone screen, unclogging your shower drain does not in itself feel like an exciting, highly motivated act. More often it feels like an unavoidable chore, something you have to get around to doing before the problem gets worse.

It might be something you avoid completely, and for any number of reasons. If you do not know how to sew, buying new clothes may seem the easier option. If you have the money, a cracked phone screen may be an opportunity to upgrade. You may not have the free time to deep clean your home, even when you are acutely aware it needs attention. Lacking money, skills and time, most of us are getting by with at least a few half-functioning things.

I think these problems get at why repair is so important. Repairing stuff is rarely if ever a neutral act. More often than not it requires very specific skills and tools, which raises questions around who has the time to learn those skills, and who has the resources to acquire those tools. The act of repair is unavoidably tangled up with our economic and political ecology.

Repair can often feel like an act of resistance these days. There are a lot of people who benefit from us not having the ability, equipment and time to fix our stuff when it breaks. Hardware manufacturers can sell you the fix instead, or just sell you the replacement. Software companies can sell you the technical support, or sell you the upgrade.

Far more of us lose out though from not being able to fix our own stuff. We lose out by having to pay more for crappier things. We lose out by being locked into walled gardens and subscriptions. A large portion of the world’s population bears the effects of our toxic manufacturing processes and outsourcing of our waste.

Against this context, the act of repair has the potential to connect to a wide range of movements that challenge our status quo. It feels really good to fix something myself, to learn from someone else how to fix it, or (more rarely for me) to help someone else out. It feels these days like the most powerful people in the world are doing their absolute best to erode our autonomy. Repair in its own way is an opportunity to rebuild our sense of community, to share what we know and to push back even a little against the fucked up situation we find ourselves in.

This directory aims to be a starting point for exploring community-based repair meetups, movements and networks. It aims to focus less on commercialised spaces and more on things that give you the opportunity to get involved yourself, whether you need something fixed or whether you want to help fix something.

Get involved!

All of our stuff is destined to fall apart eventually. If there is any upside to this irrevocable truth, it is that figuring out how to repair it all is a fantastic opportunity to learn new skills, meet new people and share what you know - and who knows, maybe even fix a couple things along the way!

This initial version of the directory focuses on community-based spaces. These offer a couple pathways to get more involved in repair communities.

If you have broken stuff, you have a few options outside of simply throwing it away. If you think you can fix it yourself you may only need to borrow some tools from a community toolbox. Or if you are less confident you could take it to a repair cafe and get help from an expert volunteer. This is a great way to learn new skills. It can be much cheaper than replacing things outright. And there are often snacks and free coffee!

You may not have anything that needs fixing (for now) but you have fixed stuff before. Maybe you know how to mend clothes, service bicycles or troubleshoot computers? In this case, hackerspaces and repair cafes will welcome your expertise. They are an opportunity to help other people, share what you know or just talk shop.

If this directory tries to emphasise one thing, it is that learning new things and sharing what we know is an enormously valuable act!

Repair directory

This section is somewhere between a directory and a glossary for different repair meetups and movements happening across the world. It aims to keep things high level and provide links to other, more specific directories and maps where they exist.

Community toolboxes

Sometimes the biggest barrier to repairing something is not having the right tools.

Community toolboxes, also known as tool libraries and libraries of things, allow you to borrow tools when you only need them for a limited time. They may charge membership fees, but this is less expensive than buying things outright and it often gives you access to a wide variety of tools. The one in my city, for example, offers everything from power tools to an apple spiraliser.

I have not been able to find a reliable directory or map of community toolboxes. Your best bet would be to check out any sustainability groups in your local area!

Useful for: specific tools

Hackerspaces

Hackerspaces, also known as makerspaces, are physical spaces where people can work and collaborate on projects. They may provide shared equipment, resources and tools. Lots of hackerspaces also run meetups and workshops. The one near me, for example, runs weekly meetups for both electronics hacking and for general woodworking, metalworking and mechanics.

While hackerspaces are not geared specifically around fixing stuff, they share a similar ethos to things like community toolboxes and repair cafes of pooling resources and sharing knowledge.

Useful for: getting help, learning skills, sharing knowledge, specific tools

iFixit

If you want to fix something yourself, iFixit can be a great place to start! This site hosts user-submitted guides, teardowns and a discussion forum for a wide variety of appliances and electronics. It heavily emphasises the right-to-repair movement and to this end hosts a repair manifesto (if you can’t fix it, you don’t own it) and assigns repairability scores to many devices.

Useful for: getting help, learning skills, sharing knowledge

Repair cafes

Repair cafes are places where you can bring your broken stuff, to get fixed by expert volunteers. They also provide coffee, resources and tools. In comparison to hackerspaces they are more like meetups. For example, the one near me runs once a month at the local community centre.

This can make repair cafes a little tricker to get to. The upside is that they can be less intimidating than hackerspaces. The volunteers are there to help you. Even if you have nothing needing repair, you can also just hang around and learn how to fix different things.

Useful for: getting help, learning skills, sharing knowledge

Repair reads

There are a lot of articles, books and essays about repair in one form or another! This section brings together a small sample of further readings.

De Decker, “How and Why I Stopped Buying New Laptops”

An account of going back to using a laptop manufactured in the early two-thousands. Kris De Decker writes about how to address the practical issues in using old hardware (buy backups you can harvest for parts, install a lightweight linux distribution) but also emphasises the limits of this approach:

“Although capitalism could provide us with used laptops for decades to come, the strategy outlined above should be considered a hack, not an economical model. It’s a way to deal with or escape from an economic system that tries to force you and me to consume as much as possible. It’s an attempt to break that system, but it’s not a solution in itself.”

Frichot, “The Year in Repair”

One in a regular set of “the year in…” articles. Hélène Frichot reflects on a year of (dis)repair in the context of the genocide in Gaza, on the result of the Australian Indigenous Voice Referendum and on several participatory art events. She argues that repair and reparation affects not just our infrastructure, but our politics too.

Iaso, “Rolling the Ladder Up Behind Us”

This is not strictly an article about repair. It focuses on the way AI-based automation and vibe-coding may supplant skilled programming, leading to poorer-quality software, in the same way that the introduction of automated looms supplanted skilled weavers and paved the way for mass produced clothing. These are the same stakes affecting the world of repair: the erosion of our capacity to make and fix things, for cheaper, crappier substitutes with shorter lifespans.

Nova and Bloch, Dr Smartphone

An ethnography of smartphone repair shops! This book collects lots of interviews with technicians around Switzerland, focusing on their day-to-day work, how they repair devices that are often never designed to be repaired and how they share this knowledge with other technicians. It is also accompanied by cute illustrations and comics.

Places Journal, “Field Notes on Repair”

A series published by Places Journal that invites activists, artists, designers and scholars to talk about the practice of repair. There is a huge variety of writing across this series, often with an architectural or urban focus. Just one of many favourites is Brandi T. Summers’ account of the “Moms House” squatters movement, in the third set of essays.

Places Journal, “Repair Manual”

A series published by Places Journal that asks how the design professions can help repair our overburdened world. There are articles in here about architecture, education and water management. My favourite though is Shannon Mattern’s “Step by Step,” a social history of repair manuals!

Endmatter

Tags: @in-progress

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