Reparative Practices: Invitations from mundane urban ecologies

Abstract

The paper proposes a reparative turn in co-design towards an attention and sensitivity to more-than-human world-making practices in our urban environments. The notion of ‘reparative’ hold strings with the reparative system that an organism starts when damage is experienced. Thinking-with this biological, cultural and performatively, we propose the reparative as the starting point for learning to notice life-giving potentialities in the Anthropocene. Reparative practices are ethical and political in the sense that we are searching for life-giving practices that can move us beyond design practices in the Anthropocene. Hence, by bringing attention to environmental enchantments related to sensory everyday practices we propose that designers and citizens alike can initiate reparative futures.