Repair and reuse initiatives: which interactions between stakeholders
Résumé
Reuse practices were studied and analysed by different researchers, in order to understand the possible resistance to the second hand consumption and to draw emblematic types and profiles of re-users. Conversely, the repair universe is less known, despite the growing making culture against throwaway society. Repair contributes to design a new pathway for the object and to an ecology of care. According to several researchers, reuse and repair can also be interpreted as ways of challenging the current economic rationale based upon accelerated cycle of production-consumption-disposal. The RECYLUSE research explores these practices from different points of view: the representations of reuse and repair initiatives, the expectations of inhabitants, who can be possible customers of the initiatives. Apprehending "the intermingling of space, place, and ethics in the constitution of a cultural economy of alternative" activities like repair appears to be decisive to analyse how repairers, holders of repair structures, consumers can share set of practices and which kind of rational and affective emotions take place. The project combines different scientific disciplines: engineering sciences and social sciences with quantitative and qualitative approaches (i.e. survey, semi-directive interviews, observation, and organisation of living labs). It relies on two French case studies: Coeur de Savoie and the Basque Country. A particular question tackled in this paper is how the new initiatives concerning the upcycling, repair and reuse of "waste" conceive the future or current users of their business or activities and if and how these representations and associated goals meet with inhabitants and possible users' expectations. The encounter between these outlooks seems less a question of shared values than of geographical and cognitive proximity, as well economic godsend. Indeed, ressourceries/recycleries/repair cafés are frequented by a little part of people in their catchment area and not well identified. The transformation of what is considered as rubbish or no more functional can be translated into different actions: Repairing, fixing, mending, upcycling. This diversity also reveals a specific relationship with the object, which is differently appropriated by R&R (repair and reuse) organisations and do not automatically match people's expectations.
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