Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in the second part of our tour around Cape Town, Design Indaba founder Ravi Naidoo shows us the former industrial suburb of Woodstock, which the city’s design community has recently made its home, and explains the importance of upcycling in South African design.
“If you have 36 hours in Cape Town and time is at a premium, you have to head down to Woodstock,” says Naidoo. It is an area of Cape Town three kilometres from the city centre that has undergone an “extreme makeover” in recent years and is now home to an array of arts, craft, fashion and design studios and shops, as well as cafés and restaurants.
(via “South Africa has always had an upcycling culture” | Design Indaba)
In Metropolis, Derrick Mead reports on RX Made:
Through the RX Made initiative, community members, including those with barriers to employment, train to reclaim building materials and turn them into products like this clock by Strand Design.
An innovative way to give new life to old tires: In Milwaukee, two students are trying to connect two neighborhoods via an old rail line. And they’re using the old tires the future park is littered with to make it more than just a gravel path.
![We champion both the idea of mending or repairing what you already own and initiatives that help to connect people and build communities.
So, naturally, we love this story from Grist on the Free Mending Library: a man mends clothes — for free — on San Francisco streets, while cultivating community:
Once a month for the past 11 years, Michael Swaine has mended clothing for free on the San Francisco streets.
At first, he did a five-mile route through the city, from dusk to dawn, with a sewing machine covered by an umbrella on wheelbarrow wheels. He loved the route, but it was exhausting and often folks didn’t have their torn clothes with them when he rolled by. He eventually settled at the Luggage Store, a nonprofit artist collective in the Tenderloin District, a tougher part of town. He’s so committed to the project, the Free Mending Library, that he’s only missed three months out of more than 130.
Swaine is an artist, an active member of Futurefarmers (a loose collective of artists, designers, farmers, and computer programmers), and a ceramics instructor. “Most people think of me as a fibers artist. Or a social artist,” he says in a video. “There’s all sorts of strange words [that] people say to me. I try to ignore them.”
I first came across Swaine in Fashion and Sustainability: Design for Change, a wonderful little book about the folks who are rethinking fashion and trying to create a more sustainable clothing industry. Swaine took the time to chat with me about the beautiful things that happen on streets, our throwaway culture, and the strangest thing he’s ever fixed.
Q. What exactly is the Free Mending Library?
A. Everyone is welcome. Everyone is welcome to bring something to be mended — and equally people are welcome to come and help mend. Those are the days that I love the most, when there’s a really wonderful balance — people coming to help mend, people sitting and telling stories, people bringing things to be mended. It’s nice when all of those things are happening at once.
Read the rest: San Francisco artist mends clothes and builds community — just by giving a darn | Grist](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mc1whvDs701qzv12bo1_r1_400.jpg)
We champion both the idea of mending or repairing what you already own and initiatives that help to connect people and build communities.
So, naturally, we love this story from Grist on the Free Mending Library: a man mends clothes — for free — on San Francisco streets, while cultivating community:
Once a month for the past 11 years, Michael Swaine has mended clothing for free on the San Francisco streets.
At first, he did a five-mile route through the city, from dusk to dawn, with a sewing machine covered by an umbrella on wheelbarrow wheels. He loved the route, but it was exhausting and often folks didn’t have their torn clothes with them when he rolled by. He eventually settled at the Luggage Store, a nonprofit artist collective in the Tenderloin District, a tougher part of town. He’s so committed to the project, the Free Mending Library, that he’s only missed three months out of more than 130.
Swaine is an artist, an active member of Futurefarmers (a loose collective of artists, designers, farmers, and computer programmers), and a ceramics instructor. “Most people think of me as a fibers artist. Or a social artist,” he says in a video. “There’s all sorts of strange words [that] people say to me. I try to ignore them.”
I first came across Swaine in Fashion and Sustainability: Design for Change, a wonderful little book about the folks who are rethinking fashion and trying to create a more sustainable clothing industry. Swaine took the time to chat with me about the beautiful things that happen on streets, our throwaway culture, and the strangest thing he’s ever fixed.
Q. What exactly is the Free Mending Library?
A. Everyone is welcome. Everyone is welcome to bring something to be mended — and equally people are welcome to come and help mend. Those are the days that I love the most, when there’s a really wonderful balance — people coming to help mend, people sitting and telling stories, people bringing things to be mended. It’s nice when all of those things are happening at once.
Read the rest: San Francisco artist mends clothes and builds community — just by giving a darn | Grist
We’re fans of free book exchanges, like the Little Free Libraries; the now-defunct-phone-booths-turned-mini-libraries (here, here, here, here, and here); shelves in London Tube and train stations and in airports that enable travelers to swap books; former newspaper racks; and a 1979 Ford transformed into a bookmobile from which free books are distributed in Buenos Aires, among others, that spring up in public spaces.
(We’re also fond of more traditional libraries that are housed in non-traditional settings like repurposed old buses and historic barns and churches.)
And now in Paris, there’s this communal book exchange sitting atop a tree cage:
Strasbourg-based street artist Florian Rivière is back with a new, neat urban intervention! Last weekend, Rivière installed a little library on a sidewalk near Gare du Nord … .
I don’t know if that’s a pallet or a crate (or both), but I like it!
See a couple of Riviere’s other urban interventions, a.k.a., “hacktions,” here.
(via Urban Hacktivist Launches Street Library — The Pop-Up City)
![Repair Cafes: An Effort to Bury a Throwaway Culture One Repair at a Time
There’s so much to love about an effort that involves volunteers — helping each other while strengthening a sense of community — and encourages people to repair items they already own. (All key aspects of Unconsumption, as many of you are aware.)
Our friends at Do The Green Thing recently wrote about Repair Cafes. (Green Thing’s post is here.) After reading the Green Thing post, I made myself a note to research the cafe project, and am pleased to see The New York Times covering it today:
At Amsterdam’s first Repair Cafe, an event originally held in a theater’s foyer, then in a rented room in a former hotel and now in a community center a couple of times a month, people can bring in whatever they want to have repaired, at no cost, by volunteers who just like to fix things.
Conceived of as a way to help people reduce waste, the Repair Cafe concept has taken off since its debut two and a half years ago. The Repair Cafe Foundation has raised about $525,000 through a grant from the Dutch government, support from foundations and small donations, all of which pay for staffing, marketing and even a Repair Cafe bus.
Thirty groups have started Repair Cafes across the Netherlands, where neighbors pool their skills and labor for a few hours a month to mend holey clothing and revivify old coffee makers, broken lamps, vacuum cleaners and toasters, as well as at least one electric organ, a washing machine and an orange juice press.
“In Europe, we throw out so many things,” said Martine Postma, a former journalist who came up with the concept after the birth of her second child led her to think more about the environment. “It’s a shame, because the things we throw away are usually not that broken. There are more and more people in the world, and we can’t keep handling things the way we do.
“I had the feeling I wanted to do something, not just write about it,” she said. But she was troubled by the question: “How do you try to do this as a normal person in your daily life?”
Inspired by a design exhibit about the creative, cultural and economic benefits of repairing and recycling, she decided that helping people fix things was a practical way to prevent unnecessary waste.
While the Netherlands puts less than 3 percent of its municipal waste into landfills, there is still room for improvement, according to Joop Atsma, the state secretary for infrastructure and the environment.
“The Repair Cafe is an effective way to raise awareness that discarded objects are indeed still of value,” Mr. Atsma wrote in an e-mail.
More: Amsterdam Tries to Change Culture With ‘Repair Cafes’ - NYTimes.com
[Thanks to Estelle H. for helping to ensure we saw the NYT story!]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3rfvjJq401qzv12bo1_400.jpg)
Repair Cafes: An Effort to Bury a Throwaway Culture One Repair at a Time
There’s so much to love about an effort that involves volunteers — helping each other while strengthening a sense of community — and encourages people to repair items they already own. (All key aspects of Unconsumption, as many of you are aware.)
Our friends at Do The Green Thing recently wrote about Repair Cafes. (Green Thing’s post is here.) After reading the Green Thing post, I made myself a note to research the cafe project, and am pleased to see The New York Times covering it today:
At Amsterdam’s first Repair Cafe, an event originally held in a theater’s foyer, then in a rented room in a former hotel and now in a community center a couple of times a month, people can bring in whatever they want to have repaired, at no cost, by volunteers who just like to fix things.
Conceived of as a way to help people reduce waste, the Repair Cafe concept has taken off since its debut two and a half years ago. The Repair Cafe Foundation has raised about $525,000 through a grant from the Dutch government, support from foundations and small donations, all of which pay for staffing, marketing and even a Repair Cafe bus.
Thirty groups have started Repair Cafes across the Netherlands, where neighbors pool their skills and labor for a few hours a month to mend holey clothing and revivify old coffee makers, broken lamps, vacuum cleaners and toasters, as well as at least one electric organ, a washing machine and an orange juice press.
“In Europe, we throw out so many things,” said Martine Postma, a former journalist who came up with the concept after the birth of her second child led her to think more about the environment. “It’s a shame, because the things we throw away are usually not that broken. There are more and more people in the world, and we can’t keep handling things the way we do.
“I had the feeling I wanted to do something, not just write about it,” she said. But she was troubled by the question: “How do you try to do this as a normal person in your daily life?”
Inspired by a design exhibit about the creative, cultural and economic benefits of repairing and recycling, she decided that helping people fix things was a practical way to prevent unnecessary waste.
While the Netherlands puts less than 3 percent of its municipal waste into landfills, there is still room for improvement, according to Joop Atsma, the state secretary for infrastructure and the environment.
“The Repair Cafe is an effective way to raise awareness that discarded objects are indeed still of value,” Mr. Atsma wrote in an e-mail.
More: Amsterdam Tries to Change Culture With ‘Repair Cafes’ - NYTimes.com
[Thanks to Estelle H. for helping to ensure we saw the NYT story!]
Happy National Library Week — the annual celebration, led by the American Library Association, of all things library! This week, in honor of Library Week, we’ll feature a series of library- and book-related posts.
Today, the Unconsumption spotlight is on Little Free Libraries: community book exchanges — located in places like your neighbor’s front yard, and on college campuses and in hospitals — where library cards aren’t needed. The libraries’ basic concept is: “Take a book. Leave a book.”
Most of the “libraries,” which hold 20-30 donated books, are made from reclaimed materials. Each library, which has an official caretaker who builds and maintains it, is registered by the Little Free Library (LFL) project, with its location noted on the LFL Web site. So far, more than 200 little libraries have opened in 34 states and 17 countries.
The libraries not only provide a way for people to pass along books they no longer want, they also help foster a sense of community. In this NPR story on the Little Free Library project, a library user says: “there are all of these nice, little serendipitous connections that happen with your neighbors.” A library caretaker mentioned meeting, via her free library, neighbors who live a block away — neighbors she hadn’t met previously.
Through the non-profit project, LFL co-founders Todd Bol and Rick Brooks aim to promote literacy and love of reading; they also hope that more people (you, perhaps?) will contact them about opening free little libraries in their own communities!
See also:
- Earlier Unconsumption posts on various community-driven book swaps, including several operating out of old phone booths, plus other swapping-related projects and services here.
- More on sharing and the sharing economy / collaborative consumption, libraries, and books.
Phone booths re-purposed as micro-libraries in New York City. (via Designboom)
I love urban interventions, especially when books are involved. (Check out this newspaper stand converted into a community lending library, if you haven’t already seen it.)
Anyway, this NYC phone-booth-turned-book-swap is a great addition to the group of repurposed phone booths featured previously on Unconsumption (here), which includes other micro-libraries in various cities.
Are there other repurposed phone booths that we — your friendly Unconsumption hosts — haven’t yet come across?
(via wnyc)
Residents of Asheville, North Carolina’s Burton Street Community — a neighborhood which fell into decline during the past four decades — have been working with the non-profit Asheville Design Center ”to transform discarded objects into art, neglected properties into community spaces, and at-risk youth into creative catalysts for change.”
A major component of their improvement efforts is an interactive learning and teaching space, designed and built by area university students and community members, in the Burton Street Peace Garden.
Materials used include discarded signs (a large Texaco sign, pictured above, serves as a sliding door), old windows, and door and window screens, among other items.
More at polis: Creative Reuse Transforms Asheville Community.
Awesome use of a defunct telephone box as a local communal book swap. Brüner Bücherkiste (by photojennic).
See also: Earlier Unconsumption posts on old phone booths used for new purposes.
In England: Another obsolete phone booth’s repurposed as a community lending library.
(via TreeHugger; hat tip to Do The Green Thing)
Check out other phone booths converted to new uses here.
