Generous Cities - a summary

Felipe Schmidt Fonseca

Berlin, July 2024

Keywords: #generosity #urban #conviviality #reuse #repair #circularity

Initial comment

After the Viva Voce, the examination board required me to apply modifications to the thesis as a condition to awarding the doctoral degree. I agreed with all the recommendations, as they would make the thesis more robust and clear. I, however, struggled for a couple of months trying to find the best way to work on those improvements. My brilliant supervisor Dr Nick Spencer offered a suggestion during a call: “start with a blank document and summarise your research”. I did just that. The resulting text was handy when actually editing the thesis, reminding me what the main elements of the whole research were. I submitted the final version of the thesis in March, and my degree was confirmed in May. Subsequently, I was left with the summary without knowing exactly what to do with it. It is too long to be submitted as a typical conference paper, and arguably too broad to be a book chapter. I ended up editing it a bit further, and finally decided to post it openly here in my research blog. It will probably be one of the last posts to this blog. A PDF version is also available from the Internet Archive.

P.S.: more in-depth documentation about this doctoral research can be found in my research wiki.

TL;DR

The concept of generous cities was the central binding element of my PhD thesis produced for the OpenDoTT project (Northumbria University / Mozilla / University of Dundee, 2019–2023). It proposes an alternative framing for the handling of excess materials (things kept unused or prematurely discarded), to overcome the conceptual and practical limitations of a waste management paradigm chiefly focused on recycling. A generous city perspective, in turn, promotes the development of commons-based systems to collectively identify and realise the value of excess materials. It does so through practices of reuse to benefit local communities, organisations, and businesses. The concept borrows elements from diverse fields of knowledge and is aligned with growing awareness of the need to mitigate the impacts of human activity on the planet. The generous city perspective offers a concrete critique of unregulated industrial production guided only by profit extraction under neoliberal capitalism. It promotes conviviality as a basis for the regeneration of social bonds and the creation of more sustainable practices. This text provides an overview of the scenario, motivations, and methods I adopted in my doctoral research, and describes some of its outcomes and potential future developments.

Excess

The groundwork that brought my investigation to the concept of generous cities started with a focus on waste and discarded materials in cities. I was particularly interested in what can be called excess materials. Those would be, as defined in my thesis, those goods, and objects that retain potential value but are either:

• prematurely discarded after being used for a time,
• broken or considered unfit, obsolete, or otherwise inadequate, or
• kept out of use for any other reasons.

My approach to transforming the handling of such materials is founded on critical engagement with the ways contemporary societies describe and reproduce themselves. Collective narratives centred on industrial production, markets as the fundamental means of social exchange, and competition as the quintessential human impulse entail profoundly questionable reward mechanisms. Society extracts too many natural resources to make more things than we can possibly use at any given point in time. Of course, there are efforts to optimise production through various means, increase circularity, and create more sustainable product design principles. While those initiatives are laudable, however, even in the best of scenarios they will still take generations to achieve significant change. That means we are poised to deal with a growing volume of things either prematurely wasted or altogether left unused. Excess materials. Those materials are reminders of how global capitalism is largely based on wasteful practices. Engaging with them can have deeper significance than just objective resource optimisation.

This text questions the assumption that excess materials should be immediately sent to recycling by logistic operations shaped exclusively on industrial foundations. I start describing two central reasons for that: the objective value of things, and a social-political critique of contemporary conditions. I also reflect on the participation of local communities, describe the research studies performed during my doctoral studies and show some of the outputs they generated. Finally, I explore ways to reshape the narrative on excess materials and waste, towards convivial practices to address these issues as developed in length in my doctoral thesis.

The value of things

The first reason to avoid the immediate recycling of excess materials is simply the concrete value of physical things. Recycling frequently results in a decrease in the objective quality of materials. Many authors argue that such processes would more appropriately be called “downcycling” precisely for that reason (McDonough & Braungart, 2013). As a typical example, recycled paper is typically less resistant than virgin paper. Similarly, most recycled plastics are less versatile and mouldable than newly produced ones. The same applies to other types of materials, with a handful of exceptions. In other words, in many cases, recycling – downcycling – devalues things.

Such value degradation is even more significant in products made with multiple combined source materials. As an extreme but quite common example, extracting monetary value from discarded electronics through recycling is a profoundly complex matter. Doing so properly requires specific equipment to allow the disassembly, separation, cleaning, and transforming of goods back into materials appropriate for industrial production. A sizable part of such resulting materials has a low market value, if any. Only a fraction of the seldom standardised materials used in electronics is actually worth recovering for the potential price of resale (notably, traces of gold and other precious materials used in some electronics). Furthermore, some parts of electronic waste are inherently toxic. The need to have advanced machinery and a very specific workforce (skilled and protected health-wise) increases operational expenses and the need for investment. As a result, there are not many recycling plants that can successfully recover value. This way, discarded electronics used on the whole planet would need to travel long distances to be processed the right way. Recycling discarded electronics properly and ethically is hence not really sustainable.

To describe as briefly (and admittedly superficially) as possible, contemporary industrial production is structured around the extraction of materials from natural sources, their transportation to different parts of the globe, and their transformation into products. Such transformation requires labour, energy, and applied knowledge. The obvious environmental impacts of resource extraction, transformation, and logistics mean that products should have as long life cycles as possible. In other words, every time a product is prematurely recycled (or worse—incinerated or put in a landfill), the resources invested in manufacturing are literally wasted. We should postpone recycling as much as possible.

That is precisely the reasoning for a recommended hierarchy of priorities in contemporary waste policy: waste prevention (refuse, reduce, reuse) should precede waste treatment (recycling, incineration, landfilling). Nevertheless, public discussion and a significant proportion of media coverage tend to treat the reuse and recycling of materials as all but the same.

The confusion between such significantly distinct processes leads to conceptual mistakes. Not rarely, relevant initiatives of material reuse identify themselves as being about recycling. As a consequence, instead of being correctly valued on a higher scale for achieving results even before materials are considered waste, such initiatives are often lost in an ocean of circular and recycling greenwashing where large corporate actors and their associates dominate the narrative (Syberg, 2022). In that scenario, society is led to think that the relative increase in the volume of materials being collected for recycling means that the overall environmental impact is being reduced. In a scenario of growing consumption, that is not true. As pointed out by many experts, recycling is not enough (‘Reaching 2030’s residual municipal waste target why recycling is not enough’, n.d.).

The generous city perspective proposes to shift emphasis from a recycling narrative towards one centred on reuse, particularly through repairs, upcycling and re-circulation. Recycling should only come as a second-to-last resource. In my doctoral research, I decided to be strict and only use the term recycling for those processes aiming at recovering value by transforming goods and objects back into source materials for industrial production (Jørgensen, 2019). My investigation subscribes to the principles mentioned above: that such processes should only take place once the possibilities of reusing said goods and materials have been fully explored, allowing society at large to benefit primarily from their potential value. Additionally, my research centred on the human perspective of the reuse of materials, and proposed ways to augment the capacity of people and communities who engage with such practices. That is, intentionally shifting away from a strictly efficiency-oriented top-down industrial perspective so as to incorporate wider social and political considerations.

The (eco-)politics of reuse

In addition to the loss of objective value, it is equally important to describe a second set of reasons to avoid the immediate processing of excess materials through industrial recycling, based on a social-political and social-environmental critique. As hinted above, most of the global industrial production adopts the so-called linear paradigm, sometimes summarised on the words “take – make – waste” Webster (2017). In other words: extracting materials from nature, transforming them into products, and later discarding them with little regard for planetary impacts. I have already discussed some implications of that in terms of material value. What remains to be reflected upon is the following: in seeking solutions for the destruction of value that results from typically wasteful capitalist industrial production, should we resort to the same actors who created that situation in the first place? In other words, should industrial corporations be trusted and rewarded with guaranteed and frictionless source materials for sustaining their production? My research adopts a critical perspective on that.

Challenging the status quo requires a more in-depth analysis of the incentive mechanisms established by a corporate industrial paradigm. The actors who benefit mostly from such mechanisms are inherently dependent on the need to keep turning short-term profits and market valuation. That includes, of course, the lack of accountability for externalities, but extends to other biases. As I explore in the thesis, for-profit corporations will more often than not strive to:

• Increase prices as much as possible under the consumers’ perception, making use of sophisticated manipulation techniques in terms of style and identity. That allows them to make their products be considered more valuable than the competitors’ – even in the cases where they are objectively the same.
• Reduce wages and working conditions to the bare minimum established by legal or class-based workers’ rights regulations, often relocating their industrial plants to parts of the world where labour is cheaper or less protected.
• Employ materials from unethical provenance – sometimes relying on child labour, environmentally questionable extraction and processing of materials, poor workers’ protections, or even sourcing materials from conflict and war-thorn areas, as well as engaging with corrupt actors.
• Ignore as much as possible the long-term impacts of their products once they are not in use any more – sometimes actively promoting planned obsolescence and/or concealing known information about the low repairability or the high toxicity of their products.

One would not be wrong to think that competition-oriented for-profit corporations are not the ideal type of organisation to arbitrate for the long-term material and social effects of industrial production. Expecting them to have the planet’s and its populations’ best interests as a priority when designing solutions for waste is arguably selective blindness.

Of course, private investment, competition, markets, and profit all have a fundamental role in advancing technology for industrial production and making goods reach their consumers and users. There is no question that many accomplishments of recent centuries were accelerated by the capitalist model. On the other hand, many ill effects of the industrial revolution are typically unmentioned on triumphant accounts of its success. To list only a handful of those: environmental degradation and extreme climate events, continuous war, growing social inequality, dissolution of social bonds, forced migration, historical and contemporary colonial practices sustained by asymmetric power. Even respecting the place that for-profit corporations have and will have in the foreseeable future, society needs system-based governance models that account for the wider and long-term impacts of human activity. That is also true for material resources.

Some assumptions must be challenged if we are to understand and develop systems to overcome the many contradictions of contemporary times. The narrative usually pushed by neoliberal capitalism argues that capital-backed innovators are the main – or sole – driving force behind human progress. Nonetheless, there are many hidden sides of that story. Not only, as mentioned above, are there externalities of industrial capitalism in social, economic and environmental terms to be accounted for. Additionally, there is the intentional invisibility of the impact of public investment in providing the very groundwork for innovation. That investment obviously involves an infrastructural level – the provision of public services such as health, transportation and housing, as well as incentives for industrial production. It is also present on social and cultural sides, in the form of investment in education, the arts, and leisure. Finally, there is the crucial role played by industrial investment in basic science and technology. Mariana Mazzucato (Mazzucato, 2018) criticises the “takers”, private actors who reap benefits made possible by the “entrepreneurial state” by leveraging their position against competitors whilst calling themselves “inventors”. Such so-called inventors usually fail to retribute to society after they become successful – by exploring, for instance, loopholes like moving their capital offshore to avoid paying taxes. Furthermore, copyright lawfare allows first movers to establish monopolies and block newcomers to innovate. Similarly to the linear manufacturing paradigm but on another level, the takers extract and don’t regenerate. Not only in terms of materials, but on the very grounds for innovation too.

The search for more appropriate ways to balance economic development, social justice and environmental responsibility will benefit from perspectives more diverse than the mere opposition between public and private actors. Elinor Ostrom’s life work on the commons (Ostrom, 1990) brings contributions to the discussion on how to recognise and further develop sustainable and inclusive systems for the collective management of shared resources. My research explored attempts to apply commons-inspired visions to post-consumption goods and materials. I focus particularly on post-consumption. That is, what happens to things after being designed, manufactured and sold to consumers. Most of the discussion of alternatives seems to focus on influencing the design of things yet to be produced – and thus disregards those already piling up in cities and towns around the world. In the next sections, I’ll explore a bit more of those contradictions.

On circles and doughnuts

Lately, emerging fields of discourse and policy have attempted to promote awareness about the externalities of industrial production in order to effect positive system change. That is the case of the circular economy and the doughnut economy, summarised critically below.

The circular economy tries to identify externalities of manufacturing and create ways of accounting for such externalities. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation created a simplified way to visualise such a scenario, with what they call the Butterfly Diagram (Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2019). It recommends distinct ways to organise industrial production, depending on the type of product. There would be two main categories: the biological cycle for products composed of organic materials, and the technical cycle for those based on synthetic materials. On a slightly different take, the doughnut economy adopts another form of circular diagram – this one shaped as a doughnut – to basically rewrite mainstream economic theory. Its lead proponent Kate Raworth asserts that the goal of economic science should not be to pursue sheer growth, but rather to find the right balance between ensuring living conditions for all and sustainable modes of production (Raworth, 2017).

I am a Latin American activist-researcher whose work has for decades promoted dialogue between non-western knowledge and the fields of human rights, social inclusion and technology. Coming from that background, I welcome the move from seeing time as a linear arrow to a perspective of circularity. Iterative cycles, dynamic system reshaping, redundancy and repetition are important elements of the human communities with which I have worked on many occasions, and were central to how my research was structured. I need nonetheless to question some assumptions of how the circular economy is being framed/shaped by industrial actors, and in particular their purposes for doing so.

As noted above, a worldview whose exclusive communication mechanism is profit-based market exchange is all but insufficient to drive more circular futures. The motivation for reincorporating used goods in manufacturing should not be the guaranteed sourcing of reliable materials for corporations that will maintain exploitative practices elsewhere. And the version of a circular economy considered acceptable by typical corporate actors usually avoids that kind of discussion.

What are, after all, the kinds of change that will benefit society at large? Devoid of political consideration, a market-based transition to a more circular economy may, in fact, reinforce inequalities and the aforementioned negative side effects of the industrial era. Additionally, it may as well be a trap similar to that of industrial-minded recycling, leading the public opinion to believe that it is fine to keep increasing consumption, provided that the proportion of virgin materials’ use decreases. That foundational distortion should be avoided. As formulated in one of my research notebooks: “do we want to develop a more circular industrial production in a way that gives even more food to the beast that created the trouble in the first place?”.

To sum up, the understanding of circularity as a transition to modes of organising manufacturing that acknowledge and address the impact of linear industrial production can indeed be a positive force. As long as the shift to circularity is not shaped only to benefit profit-oriented corporations and considers the wider social and environmental implications, it can help elicit valid conversations.

The doughnut economy in turn may indeed be a straightforward means to incorporating minimal standards of quality of life in the design of system change. Here, however, the risk is focusing too much on reaching consensus over what such standards should be and how to measure them, and in effect confusing the map for the territory. Having a neat way to visualise contradictions and conflicts is not enough to change things. Stirling (Stirling, 2015) draws attention to the role of unruly political struggle in effecting real-world transformation. He suggests the need to go beyond the mere design of transformations deemed acceptable by the status quo, and proposes the “culturing” of change. In that sense, the doughnut economy can turn out to be an interesting boundary object (Star & Griesemer, 1989). It may allow, after all, different sectors to establish conversations among distinct vocabularies about needed transformations in industrial practices whilst still keeping a focus on social inclusion.

Urban focus

Relevant authors propose that the planet faces a time of crises – not a single crisis, but multiple and connected challenges on social, economic, environmental, cultural and even cognitive aspects. Donna Haraway calls that condition the trouble, and urges us to establish new ways to socialise, observing that simplified solutions won’t achieve much (Haraway, 2016). The extent of the trouble and the need to face it is perceived and acknowledged by more and more people in cities and towns. That may be influenced by recent public discussion around concepts such as the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (Nations, n.d.), or the direct impacts noticed in people’s everyday lives.

Initiatives abound that try to address the trouble locally – if not to solve, at least to mitigate its more notable impacts. Even considering the differences between multiple vocabularies and approaches, John Thackara sees fundamental similarities between such initiatives. In short: a recognition of human life’s codependency with the lives of “plants, animals, air, water, and soils that surround us” (Thackara, 2017, p.9). Similarly, Daniel Wahl proposes the concept of “interbeing” as the basis for systems-based regenerative design (Wahl, 2016). Based on that understanding, local populations should not only be invited to provide validation or feedback about top-down policy. In his interpretation of the field of design vis-à-vis the notion of autopoiesis in Maturana and Varela (Maturana & Varela, 1980), Arturo Escobar asserts that communities have the autonomy to design and constantly re-design their own existence. But what kind of communities are we talking about?

More than half of the global population lives in cities (‘World Urbanization Prospects—Population Division—United Nations’, n.d.). That is, beyond 4 billion people worldwide are urban dwellers. Cities are arguably the most common background for social interaction—most people interact with society in cities. That has particular implications for my research focus on excess materials and how to address it. Even though people living in rural and isolated areas are also influenced by a global culture of fast consumption and discard, that takes place at a radically different pace in urban settings. By definition, rural living means less access to retail. As a result, people in the countryside have to be more conscious of the value of maintaining their things in use for a longer time. Even if such a heightened awareness of the value of things might inspire tactics for urban environments, there are particularities in cities that point to the need for specific strategies to handle excess materials.

Additionally, cities are understood by some as the main sites of reproduction of neoliberal capitalism (Morozov & Bria, 2018). As noted earlier in this text, the adoption of market-based mechanisms to handle matters of societal importance should be questioned critically, and that extends to municipalities. The urban scale is precisely where a culturing of political change towards more inclusive and sustainable futures can take place, to mention again Stirling. That is true for many elements impacting the right to the city (Lefebvre, 2017), and the same is particularly valid in the case of smart city initiatives. Digital technologies can arguably aid in improving services as diverse as transportation, lighting, communications, inventory, tax collection, public safety and other areas. It is important though to create and implement solutions in a deep partnership with local populations. Truly transformative participation, it must be remarked, requires at the same time a more nuanced understanding of the present and a more profound engagement of the people who live in cities. That is also true in the case of waste management, a field in which visibility of decisions, awareness of systems and democratic participation are particularly rare. Such a condition looks even more unbalanced when one expands from a perspective focused on managing waste (those materials already considered unusable and hence discarded) to a more nuanced one based on absorbing excess and generating value locally—economic, social and environmental.

Absorbing excess in cities

The previous sections have discussed the manifold implications of exclusively profit-oriented ways to manage post-consumption materials under neoliberal capitalism. Before I describe how my research conceptualised and designed ways to approach those questions, I recap below my intentions and motivations, as well as the scenario, some symbolic connections, and social-economic considerations.

Finding and supporting more appropriate ways to handle excess in cities requires, of course, increased awareness of how unsustainable are the prevailing industrial practices. But that alone is not enough to effect change. An effort of reimagining the meaning and implications of waste is necessary, as well as considerations about the connections of excess, industrial production and power relations. Max Liboiron states that pollution is colonialism (Liboiron, 2021), and waste is arguably similar. Therefore, the necessary reframing of excess shouldn’t simply be about removing materials from the public eye and sending them to landfilling, incineration or —often premature—recycling. Treating only the symptoms won’t cure the disease. For this reason, we should not rely exclusively on the for-profit private sector to shape how society will maintain and reincorporate materials simply through increased material circularity and more efficient recycling. As suggested above, feeding back the industrial beast with guaranteed materials won’t cut it. In my thesis, I listed some obvious disadvantages of that path:

• It makes things less valuable in objective terms through downcycling.
• It wastes – dissolves, practically – the value already applied to materials in prior phases of manufacturing by investment of energy, transportation, knowledge, and other elements.
• By focusing on objective productivity based on normalisation and automation, it arguably steals society at large of the potential concrete uses the materials could have besides recycling and re-incorporation in manufacturing.
• It often relies on public funding or handling fees paid for by city-dwellers to collect and process materials whilst private corporations retain the profits, reduced costs of material sourcing and symbolic impact (“green” / “sustainable” PR).

To be clear: downcycling removes value from society. It is consistent though with a particular vision of society that measures its success through the growth of GDP. Under that paradigm, low-quality goods that need to be constantly replaced are considered positive; whilst care and maintenance are at best neutral, when not negative. That incentivises planned obsolescence, opacity about materials and components, obstacles for repairs and adaptations, among other consequences. For-profit corporations were formed under those bases. Giving them more power over the supply chain and autonomy in managing excess would be a mistake.

Circular design is of course crucial for the future of manufacturing and distribution, but its large-scale adoption will keep progressing relatively slowly, as long as market-based systems keep rewarding unsustainable practices. To handle the growing volume of materials being discarded right now everywhere in the world, additional strategies are required. My research proposes an alternative framing for handling excess, based on commons-based regenerative practices. To build it, we must start by identifying the potential value of goods and materials idle or discarded, and create system-based ways to put them to use.

We should bear in mind that the value of industrial production is not generated exclusively by capitalist corporations. It owes significantly to societal assets – such as public infrastructure, education systems, culture, and the arts, among others. It may follow then that the potential value that can be realised by better handling excess materials should benefit society at large instead of being directed automatically to manufacturers. Furthermore, it’s about ensuring societal value, not merely replacing mining fields. Part of that vision is already being incorporated in terms of industrial policy, legislation, and regulations. But a fundamental aspect to discuss is how to connect it with the everyday lives of people and communities in cities and towns.

Community knowledge

I have been involved with initiatives of material repairs and reuse since the early 2000s – as an activist and co-founder of open networks, consultant to public institutions, and independent researcher. It follows that my doctoral investigation was partly an effort to document the knowledge embodied through my practical and situated experience, whilst identifying the conceptual context in which such knowledge was generated. Just as such documenting adopted elements of auto-ethnography of my past and ongoing experiences, though, it was not at all an individual exploration. Everything I ever learnt was with others, and that should always be reflected on how I drive my research.

During the PhD I have developed a series of studies borrowing methods from design research, open-source technologies, and social studies of science and technology. All of them had the purpose of establishing dialogue with people interested and experienced in different aspects of the post-consumption handling of materials. I came to define my overall method as a “spiral of openness”, both cyclical and linear. At every cycle, I would get to a different starting point, changing not only the methods for subsequent phases but also the founding definitions and purposes of the overall research. That gave me a considerable level of freedom to engage and learn from participants, and to adapt accordingly.

Cycle 1: entering fields

In the first phase of investigation, I conducted a design research study that asked participants to try to repair an object, and keep a journal as they progressed. At about the same time, I was interviewing different participants who worked with second-hand and discarded materials in different capacities, to help compose an ecosystem mapping of reuse in the urban context. I had naturally started my doctoral investigation bringing aboard my lived experience and assumptions deriving from it. Such assumptions were confronted, at times validated, and expanded through those first two studies.

The outputs of those first studies allowed me to dive deeper into aspects that would influence all my following work. For instance, it was then that I decided to reformulate my topic of interest from “waste management” to “waste prevention”. Likewise, the focus on excess instead of discarded materials came from an interview done at this stage. And the same is true of the understanding that people engage with community-based repair initiatives for a combination of individual and social reasons – from concretely beating planned obsolescence to establishing non-commercial relationships with peers. I already had an instinctive grasp of such motivations – the joys of repair, as formulated in one of the workshops with participants —, but the studies enabled me to assert the validity of such insights. Through the first cycle, I understood that waste prevention strategies could be deployed to precede waste management as it is usually shaped. Such strategies should be structured around concrete foundations:

• Access to idle or discarded materials.
• The ability to identify their potential value.
• The capacity to realise such potential value through reuse. That can typically happen through three kinds of actions:
  • Repair / adaptation,
  • Upcycling / transformation, and
  • Re-circulation.

Cycle 2: assessing potential value

The second cycle of research was also designed as a participatory study, but would take a more concrete shape, in particular trying to address the need to identify the potential value of excess materials. I was inspired by the image of the valoriste, a role performed in France by professionals whose expertise is to assess the potential value of excess materials. I came across the idea of valoristes before the PhD, and found little mention of them outside the French circular economy context.

This time, I organised an international online co-design lab called reuse.city, and invited people experienced in initiatives such as makerspaces, green startups and repair cafés, to advance ideas. Grounding the lab in design concepts developed in response to the first cycle of research, I invited participants to explore the skills and knowledge necessary to identify and increase the potential value of materials. I wanted to know whether those skills and knowledge could be augmented using ethically developed digital technologies, and how.

During about a month, the participants of reuse.city were asked to join live online workshops to engage with what I had achieved so far in my research. Some of them volunteered to present their work in diverse localities and organisational contexts. We discussed the fragmentation of the field – there is no easily understood class identity among the multifaceted professions and hobbies related to the reuse of materials. On the other hand, we found concrete similarities between contexts as distant as a state-funded reuse centre in Finland and an independent repair café in a refugee camp in Uganda.

In parallel, participants were called to provide feedback as I improved and prototyped a subset of my design concepts. We drafted a blueprint for the concept called Transformation Labs – reuse centres that would mix makerspaces and repair shops. I also started working on a remix of other designs that ended up taking the form of two prototypes to augment and replicate the skills of valoristes: ThingWiki, an instance of the concept of a Universal Registry of Things, and E-I, a machine to identify objects and offer information on how to repair or reuse them. Additionally, the lab itself became what I called a proto-community, which I intend to return to once I’m done with thesis work.

Cycle 3: materials in the city

For the third and final research cycle, I decided not to carry a new participatory study. Instead, I would review what I had learnt so far in the PhD from the perspective of the research interests I had at that point. I was then exploring how to revert my findings back from the workbench onto the city, so to speak. Until that point, my research had mapped post-consumption flows and the transformations that could be operated on things to make them regain potential value. I had created concept ideas and learned from experienced practitioners about the skills and experience involved in repairs, upcycling and re-circulation of goods and materials. Now, my central question would be how to promote effective transformation in how cities handle excess materials.

This cycle of my investigation was arguably the most individualistic one, as I didn’t resort directly to participatory methods for generating and collecting data. But even here, there are some remarks to be made. I was effectively returning not only to the prior phases of the PhD but crucially to my lived experience in the field before that. Based on an auto-ethnographic perspective to approach my engagement in community initiatives for two decades, it turned out to be an individual distillation of collective knowledge and experience. On the way, I brought to the fore elements of my positionality as a Latin-American activist and researcher, such as cultural traits, views on coloniality and progress. At the same time, as I found boundaries and obstacles to the concrete transformation of current practices regarding waste and excess, my work became more overtly political. It would be impossible, I found, to promote waste prevention through material reuse without exposing the systemic biases against such a proposal.

This last cycle enabled me to further develop a design-based approach to my research topic, working further on the concept idea called reuse commons. It is a toolkit to map and establish communication between local actors that can potentially be activated to create local reuse systems. At this point, I also had the chance to refine the central argument of my thesis, which I started calling the generous city. The next section will recount its founding elements and how it unfolds as a concept in itself.

Conviviality and participation

The third research spiral cycle shifted the framing of my research. As mentioned, I felt moving from a micro-focus on things, technologies, and facilities towards a broader view of how to promote the changes I envisioned in cities and towns. In parallel to revisiting notes from the first cycles and documentation of my past projects, I re-engaged with literature and references. The idea was to find areas and practices of policy-making that would contribute to reshaping how cities handle excess materials. I found there was potential in exploring some policy areas recently emerging or undergoing transformations. For instance, the image of “green deals” based on growing public awareness about the effects of climate change, as well as fields such as zero waste and the aforementioned circular economy and doughnut economy.

Needless to say, my approach to such formulations would be critical, paying attention to the systemic contradictions they often embed. Two concepts were useful to ensure that criticism. The first was the one proposed by Ivan Illich (Illich, 1973) as the only way to regenerate bonds between society: conviviality. To counter an industrial era centred on productivity, Illich says, we need to reshape the world around the idea of conviviality. Humanity should thus be in control of tools and resources in order to engage in richer social interactions.

The other image I used – with a grain of salt – to approach policy-making was the acronym WEIRD (Henrich et al., 2010). It is an attempt to refer to the dominant ideology in the current world, biased by the perspective of White, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic countries (hence “WEIRD”). Even if limited in depth and itself biased, the WEIRD notion can be used as a boundary object (Star & Griesemer, 1989) to trigger conversations across sectors, exposing and overcoming unacknowledged biases. It helps to make explicit a particular worldview that is not only present in wealthier nations, but is also reproduced and imposed by emerging authorities internationally.

Acknowledging that the way forward shall not be a linear progression from WEIRD ideology, how can we envision more plural forms of policy-making? From my birthplace, Porto Alegre, in Brazil, I recall the innovative experiments with participatory public budgeting in the early 1990s. I won’t go in much detail about it in this text, only mention that what to me seems most important in such instances is not any concrete decision on how to use public money per se. Rather, it’s the feeling that local groups acquire of being able to be part of decision-making processes. A discussion between neighbours – who never met before, in many cases – about investing in stronger lampposts or on covering potholes can trigger profound conversations on how to prioritise, and why. That is a process of disalienation. Political education on the spot.

Of course, a productivity-oriented mindset can go as far as questioning the appropriateness of decisions made by non-expert people who don’t see the big picture. Nonetheless, from a conviviality perspective, the critical appropriation of tools for democratic participation by the people who are directly affected by the decisions made is more significant. Antonio Lafuente points to practices in citizen science that not only listen to, but rather centre on, what he calls “affected communities” (Lafuente & Estalella, 2015). Participatory budgeting could as well be read as the effort to include affected communities in decision-making.

For all its openness, though, the type of participatory budgeting described above still relies on a top-down intention. That is, such policies are only tried when the local authorities are willing to do so, and for however long they allow. Even then, it is usually limited to a minor fraction of municipal budgets, and for decisions in areas of administration clearly under the responsibility of the public sector. Discussing hospitals or playgrounds happens on the level of desire. Communities generally want them, it’s more a matter of prioritising than deciding whether they are needed. In the case of infrastructure to handle excess, however, things are more complex. Very few city-dwellers want a waste management facility in their vicinity, which may stigmatise even initiatives focused on socially driven repair and reuse.

Waste prevention by affected communities

Even focused on the prevention of waste, imposing top-down solutions oriented towards industrial productivity is problematic. The mere fact that an initiative is associated with the local waste authority is likely to raise suspicion among the community. A different take here would be to draw inspiration from Lafuente’s notion of affected communities, putting more attention to commonalities and conviviality, and designing services and infrastructure with which the local society can relate. Making more explicit the human connections between hardware stores and tool shops, repair and adaptation professionals and community repair cafés, things libraries and thrift shops. People love to share stories about their things: how they were acquired, transformed, passed on. Similarly, virtually everyone with some kind of hands-on involvement with things finds joy in telling those stories. In some cases, it’s about making new things. But not always.

Vinsel and Russell point to the undervalued social perception about the “maintainers” when compared with the “innovators” or “makers”. Without maintainers, however, society would cease functioning. Every neighbourhood has professional or hobbyist maintainers in some capacity. Collectively, they are able to—and often do—perform the role of valoristes. They should therefore participate in designing waste prevention strategies, being true experts in varied relevant topics.

Another set of commonalities worth exploring lies in the concrete and practical activities of repairs and upcycling on one side, and those of Fablabs and makerspaces on the other. Even though the origins of that kind of organisation can be traced back to politically active hacklabs in Europe where creative reuse of materials was an everyday practice, that aspect has largely disappeared from today’s discourse around innovation. There are, however, particular contexts in which hints of that are present. For instance, the Fabcity network aims at changing “from PITO to DIDO” (‘Fab City Handbook’, n.d.). By that, they mean transforming cities currently based on a linear “product in – trash out” to a “data in – data out”, envisioning full manufacturing circularity within the coming decades. It is an interesting future horizon, but again, we need to start acting right now to change the mentality and reduce the wasting of potential value.

How then to create local strategies that contribute to reshaping the narrative about excess materials? My take after some years into this question is that we must strike a balance between driving change – based on the informed understanding that the status quo of waste management’s best practices is unsustainable and wasteful – and establishing alliances with local agents in diverse capacities to incorporate their needs. That is, neither trying to transform from the top down nor expecting ad hoc grassroots change to happen, for time is pressing. To build such alliances of intentional progressive change and effective participation, we need a common vocabulary. Once again, I refer to the powerful concept of boundary object to aid (Star & Griesemer, 1989). Establishing a common vocabulary does not mean replacing one’s own. Rather, it is about establishing a reduction of complexity that is acceptable for the diverse parties involved so that cross-boundary conversation of some sort can take place. That common vocabulary can take many forms. My proposal is to think in terms of generosity, as I’ll describe in the next section.

Situating reuse

For a considerable part of my PhD, I struggled to circumscribe my research topic within disciplinary borders. One of my supervisors once asked me who were “my people”. I ended up accepting that my topics of interest required me to engage with diverse fields of knowledge and practice. That position owes, obviously, to my background experience working in diverse areas. It’s not, however, an easy place to be in the context of a doctoral investigation submitted at the same time to the formal requirements of academia and to the dynamic expectations of a consortium of organisations working with open-source technologies. Moreover, the whole project was an international cooperation between the UK and the EU commission, conceptualised before Brexit was a concrete reality, which added more restrictions and conditions.

My path amidst these and other challenging aspects was resorting to what I’ve learnt during my Master’s degree, supervised by an anthropologist interested in free and open technologies. Fundamentally, accepting that contradictions between different ways to see reality are all but unavoidable at the core of forward-looking people-centred research. Where no common vocabulary exists, we are allowed to – indeed, required to – create new ones. That was the motivation, following the first research cycle, to focus on excess materials. My work was not going to be about waste policy, the right to repair, or recycling. It would be on community-based forms of handling things and materials that still had potential value, thus reducing the amount of it that would be considered waste.

Here again, a productivity centred perspective would say that, given the immense volume of materials being discarded, the (supposed) relatively small fraction that could still be used is not worth recovering. To my conviviality lenses, though, every time an object that would be sent to a landfill, incinerated or prematurely recycled is diverted from the waste stream, a series of consequences may ensue:

• Once a thing is put back in use, the need to buy a new one arguably disappears or is at least reduced. The extended lifetime reduces, albeit slightly, the pressure to extract new raw materials, contributing to what it knows as “resource sufficiency”.
• The person or community that will use the recovered object has regenerated use value from something that was about to fall beyond the boundaries of traditional economy. If a transaction results from the repair or re-selling, the waste diversion in fact turns negative economic value into positive one.
• Even in the case of reuse based on volunteer-run in collective settings, such as repair cafés or community workshops, there are plenty of societal outcomes. Examples like the emergence of community bonds beyond everyday individual lives, intergenerational knowledge exchange, and a renewed sense of belonging are commonly reported Clark & Rockefeller (2020).

Needless to say, processes like those happen frequently, practically in every place where humans dwell. They are activities that keep the world running. That makes reuse inherently embedded in and aligned with the perspective of maintenance, echoing again the work of Vinsel and Russell (Russell & Vinsel, 2016). The authors assert that innovation is overvalued, and urge society to “hail the maintainers”. That change in narrative is among the chief elements of inspiration for a good part of my research. It is akin to how Ursula K. Le Guin theorises her fiction-writing as being about carrier bags, instead of spears and arrows. It’s a re-balance between conquest and care, so to say.

Generosity as a common language

Seeking to make space for convivial approaches in my research, my view over excess gradually changed. From my past engagement with reuse initiatives looking inward, I used to see excess manifest as abundance. In other words, when we would set up labs to re-manufacture second-hand computers in Brazil, we were on the receiving end. Our lab in São Paulo, for instance, had to stop asking for donations after a couple of months, as we could not process enough of what we received. From that perspective, materials abound for initiatives willing to act. In earnest, it would take me a couple of years of experience and exchange with others to understand that such abundance was nothing but a side effect of a dysfunctional mode of production based on infinite growth and unsustainable extraction.

Searching for ways to establish conversation between different sectors and make space for convivial alternatives, I would incorporate an insight from my first months reflecting on cities and things. It was the first semester of 2020. The world was trying to understand COVID-19 and adapt to it. One day, I was on a bike ride – one of the few outdoor activities allowed then – along the river Tay in Dundee. I saw a dancing unicorn – a plush one. A blog post describes the insight I had, and the note jotted down at that moment:

Generous city
A dancing unicorn on the sidewalk.
Bike. Barcelona. Train station
Where will it end up?

Though today I would not use generosity any more in that sense, from that point it started to appear on my notes and writings. At first, I’d use generosity and abundance almost interchangeably. As if, consequentially, excess resulted in abundance and generosity. Granted, I had used those terms in the past in diverse contexts. Before leaving Brazil in 2019, I tried organising an edition of the Tropixel Festival discussing abundance and survival. The years of precariousness following a political coup and the emergence of the extreme right were so taxing that it seemed important to attempt to rephrase our situation. Abundance as a change in lenses to counter scarcity. Sadly – and tellingly – we had to cancel the festival for the lack of resources. Generosity, in turn, was used for the training sessions on free/open licensing within the Brazilian digital culture strategy back in the early 2000s. We named those courses “intellectual generosity” to establish a conversation with artists and cultural producers not familiar with permissive licences on the internet.

In my research, those two terms acquired different connotations, though. It was not abundance in seeing the world as plentiful, nor describing the circulation of shareable digital contents as generosity. A rather more concrete definition emerged from fieldwork. In moving to Berlin to continue my PhD, I could witness the habit, common in some neighbourhoods, of putting objects and products to donate in the streets. I made hundreds of photos of clothes, appliances, toys, electronics, furniture, apparel, books, and other products in boxes saying “zu verschenken”, “for donation”. I collected some of those objects to furnish my home. I saw community-built donation shelves in some parts of the city. One of my interim reports containing photos of it was titled “abundant city”. Once again, situated at the receiving end, I could see abundance. On the other hand, I sometimes had the impression that such abundance was a consequence of excess. In the capital of a rich country, people were relatively so well-off that they could do with just giving stuff away and buying anew.

But there were some particularities worth noting. The neighbourhoods where I could see that kind of behaviour were definitely not the wealthier ones in Berlin. Similarly, the users I would see parting with their stuff in donation groups in social media platforms didn’t feel like rich people wasting away. Moreover, unlike the computer donations we received in Brazil back in the day – which always required some sort of repair —, many of the products donated in Berlin were immediately usable. Talking to friends who resided in the city for some years, I got the sense that people who put things outside would do that intentionally, hoping that someone else would use them. They were not only getting rid of things to make room in their homes. That intentionality caught my attention.

Intentional care

In 2022, I presented my ongoing research in a symposium organised by professor Teresa Dillon (UWE). The name of the event, part of COP 26 (the UN Conference of the Parts on Climate Change) mentioned two elements that Dillon has been connecting in her academic as well as artistic work for some years: “Tales of Care and Repair”. The panel where I presented my work was also composed of Dr Julia Corwin (LSE), who noticed that I was not clearly differentiating between abundance and generosity. She pointed out that it was interesting to think about abundance not as the stereotypical image of the cornucopia, where everything is provided for you, but as something that requires engagement. My reaction was to discuss “care” as the core element of that kind of engagement. As I formulated then, incorporating care to handle excess enables us to turn abundance into generosity. And that was aligned with the aforementioned intentionality I was seeing in my field explorations of how second-hand goods circulate in Berlin.

Care is an important concept in contemporary feminist social theory. Joan Tronto sees care as profoundly political and proposes a “care revolution” (Tronto, 2015). That aligns with the references mentioned and reiterated in this section – the notion of conviviality in Illich, the focus on maintenance proposed by Vinsel and Russell, Le Guin’s carrier bags. That combination became the groundwork for my concept of Generous Cities.

Commons to weave generosity

Part of reimagining excess requires understanding human sociability as largely convivial, instead of essentially competitive. Care and empathy are building elements of all cultures, even if we sometimes fail to see such elements in others. Material generosity can take place in public, as I saw in Berlin, or in private, how I recall being more common in Brazil. I see advantages and disadvantages on either extreme of those kinds of social behaviour. Anonymous material generosity may feel lacking in human touch for some – exactly my case when I donate things in the streets of Berlin, in fact. Being raised in Brazil makes it seem a bit empty to just put things outside for someone to collect. On the other hand, the practices of what we might call hyperpersonal generosity like I saw growing up often cause or reinforce unbalanced relations of dependency. If someone gives you something, you automatically owe that person something.

Whatever the case, practices of concrete generosity should be identified, accounted for and valued. In fact, every city is already a generous city. To design commons-oriented systems to handle excess materials, we should start from that assumption. Some examples of initiatives I listed in my thesis that can be good starting points:

• self-organised donation networks and collection points for donations;
• solidarity-oriented nonprofits and charities offering goods for free or at affordable prices;
• religious organisations offering aid to those in need;
• repair cafés and community repair workshops;
• things libraries;
• collection points for donations offered by the public sector;
• groups on social media for free donations (freecycle, free your stuff groups on Facebook, etc.);
• online platforms to mediate sales or donations of second-hand goods (eBay, gumtree, Kleinanzeigen, etc.);
• artist-run initiatives offering training on repair and upcycling.

Among those actors are communities, nonprofits, individuals, the public sector, and private businesses. There is room for all, while I insist that seeing it exclusively through lenses of market exchange leads to distorted incentive systems and missed opportunities. In that scenario, all the nonprofit, volunteer-based, social-oriented ways to reuse and re-circulate goods and materials can – as they already do – operate together with for-profit actors – more or less formal ones – relevant for the reuse of materials, among which are:

• second-hand, vintage and antique shops and flea markets;
• professional repair shops;
• hardware stores selling tools, equipment and spare parts;
• technical schools;
• retail outlet;
• auction agents;
• pawn shops and custody businesses;
• scrap shops, salvage stores, and junkyards.

Reimagining the field requires appreciation for practices already in place and the weaving of more robust systems for material reuse. Recognising skills, sensibility, and knowledge already present in the territory instead of building from scratch to follow predefined homogeneous narratives.

As mentioned earlier, Elinor Ostrom offers a comprehensive view on the notion of commons – the systems-based collective management of shared resources (Ostrom, 1990). I propose that generous cities are de facto quite diverse commons. To leverage practices of intentional care and contribute to the needed reframing of the way cities handle excess materials, the third cycle of my research spiral would reinterpret and go deeper into one of my original concepts, the Reuse Commons.

When I created it in response to the research studies in the first cycle, Reuse Commons was a relatively abstract idea, an intention to create ways of connecting different actors and developing incentive systems for those that helped reuse materials in cities. When I returned to it a couple of years later, I had both gone deeper in understanding the societal, cultural and economic surroundings of the issues, and expanded my knowledge of regenerative design methods.

The updated version of Reuse Commons would aim at creating a participatory toolkit to weave local collective systems promoting the reuse of materials, with the horizon of nurturing more generous cities. It enables conviviality-oriented local arrangements to be developed as open and participatory systems. The generous city empowered by Reuse Commons is not meant to replace a vision of greener cities inspired by solarpunk with smarter technologies and lower emissions. Instead, it proposes a dialogue with local potentialities and abilities, adding depth and seeking buy-in within communities for more sustainable futures.

The version of Reuse Commons I was able to develop within the timeframe of my PhD is not a finished design piece. Rather, I consider it a research output that worked as an annotation device of my conceptual exploration of a series of elements: participatory alternatives to develop social, industrial and environmental policy; the concept of generous cities and its manifestations in the urban context; methods to identify and weave commons-based governance systems. On the other hand, it provides a clear structure that can be applied in cities and neighbourhoods, as much as in organisations and other local contexts. Such a structure has three levels:

1. Mapping relevant actors for the reuse of materials, be them strictly local or connected beyond local borders;
2. Identify what kinds of materials are managed by each actor and how, as well as inputs and outputs;
3. Create or improve the flow of materials within the local system by way of alliances, protocols, policy or other instruments.

It is that simple, and yet there aren’t many well-known examples of strategies for circular economy, zero waste, or resource sufficiency that adopt such a direct participatory stance. Among the many reasons for that absence, perhaps the central one is the enduring framing of excess as waste and the expectation that the appropriate solution for it is recycling.

Coming spirals

Going through the process of researching, designing and conducting studies, writing a thesis and having it formally and adequately reviewed and approved is usually a challenging but finite set of tasks. There are deadlines, procedures, reports, results. However, my research on excess materials, conviviality, and commons did not start when I registered for the PhD. And it certainly hasn’t finished when I received my degree certificate. I heard half-jokingly from peers with whom I have a decades-long involvement that I am still re-enacting the same projects I co-founded over 20 years ago. That is partly true, as some of my deepest beliefs have not changed, nor have the conditions in the world improved that much. There are valuable things kept unused, just as much as there are people who would benefit from such things. There are still materials being prematurely discarded. When we started back there, our focus was chiefly on reusing second-hand desktop computers with free and open-source software. Just as much as the internet expanded towards all kinds of things, however, my impulse to rebalance excess and avoid waste has similarly broadened. On the other hand, every time we retell a story, we may learn a new emphasis. Through my doctoral investigation, I was taught to account for intentional care when reimagining waste. I have also become more aware of the weight of ongoing colonial practices, international power relations, society-wide myths, proprietary data, and the distortions caused by unbalanced ownership systems. I don’t think I have found an answer to all of those issues. But I, along with countless peers, will keep insisting on rephrasing the questions as a way to trigger conversations and regenerate active community efforts.

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