10 Stories of Transition in the US: The Spread of Repair Cafes
In the midst of America’s Great Depression, merchants and manufacturers were looking for ways to quickly reboot the national economy. To get more people working and factories operating again, so the story goes, two main things needed to happen:
First, people had to replace what that they already owned. Through a process that real estate broker Bernard London called “planned obsolescence,” products began to be designed so they would soon fail. Second, the American people, and eventually the rest of the world, would need to shift from being the thrifty citizens that were so celebrated towards the end of World War I to the voracious consumers we are today.
While this extreme wastefulness was once seen as our civic duty, there is now a growing movement of people throughout the United States and all over the world who are finding better ways to strengthen their local economies while helping to heal the planet. One of the most exciting new strategies for doing this is a repair cafe.
Even a few decades ago, shops that fixed shoes, televisions, and a number of other everyday products were still commonplace, but these institutions have been nearly wiped out in recent years. In their place, repair cafes are now providing people with opportunities to breathe new life into broken things while cultivating community at the same time.
The modern repair cafe movement was born in the Netherlands in 2009, and it is now estimated that there are more than 1,300 such cafes operating in over 30 countries.
When Therese Brummel of the Arroyo S.E.C.O. Network of Time Banks and Transition Pasadena first read about the concept in the New York Times in 2012, she saw it as an opportunity: “The idea of keeping stuff out of our landfills and raising awareness about decreasing consumerism was something that deeply appealed to us.”
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