The manifesto runs to four pages. It was printed on a risograph in an edition of 800 and distributed at the first Repair Assembly in Ghent in March, and it has since been translated into eleven languages by volunteers who found it online. It begins: ‘A thing that cannot be repaired is not owned. It is licensed.’
The repair movement has been a policy conversation for years — a lobbying effort, a regulatory campaign, a series of legislative victories in the EU and several American states that have forced manufacturers to provide spare parts and documentation. What is new, and what the Ghent manifesto represents, is something different: the emergence of repair as identity.
“The policy victories are real and they matter,” says Marloes de Vries, one of the manifesto’s authors and the coordinator of a network of forty repair cafés across the Netherlands. “But policy doesn’t make culture. Culture makes culture. We needed something that wasn’t a white paper.”
De Vries runs a repair café every Saturday morning in a community centre in Utrecht. Forty to sixty people come through over the course of the morning, bringing toasters, lamps, bicycles, garments, toys, electronics. A core team of fifteen volunteers covers most categories of repair, and there is a waiting list to join the volunteer cohort. The café has been running for nine years. It has repaired approximately 8,400 objects in that time, by the volunteers’ count.
What has changed recently, de Vries says, is the age of the volunteers. “We used to attract retirees — people who had learned to repair things before planned obsolescence became the business model. Now we get a lot of people in their twenties and early thirties. They didn’t grow up repairing things. They came to it as a choice. As a politics.”
That politics has an aesthetic. The repair movement’s visual culture — evident in the zines, the tote bags, the screen-printed patches that volunteers wear — draws from punk and DIY craft in roughly equal measure. There are Xeroxed instruction sheets with hand-drawn diagrams. There are patches that read ‘REPAIRED’ in stencil font. There is a typeface, designed by a Berlin foundry and released as a free download, called ‘Mended’ — each letterform deliberately shows its sutures, its joins, its evidence of having been broken and fixed.
“The aesthetics came from the community, not from a brand,” says Tomás Rueda, who designed Mended and has since collaborated with repair groups in five countries on visual identities. “Nobody sat down and said ‘the repair movement needs a look.’ People just started making things and the look emerged. Which is how it should work.”
The manifesto’s fourth and final page is a list of commitments — not demands, not policy positions, but personal pledges that readers are invited to make: to repair before replacing, to learn one new repair skill per year, to share knowledge without extracting payment. It ends: ‘The opposite of disposable is not expensive. It is cared for.’
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