Repair Stories brings together artists, architects, designers, and researchers to interrogate the methods, limitations, obligations and potential of repair, and proposes an environmental imperative: repair comes first!
About This Book
Australia sits at the frontline of the climate crisis, yet national policy moves at a pace that feels disconnected from the urgency on the ground. Repair Stories looks past that impasse to the reparative work already under way — in studios, classrooms, and communities — that seeks to mend a continent still shaped by colonial dispossession and extractive economies. Edited by Hélène Frichot, Lucy Benjamin, and Virginia Mannering, this collection resists the assumption that breakage is self-evident. Instead, it interrogates repair as a practice spanning environmental responsibility, ongoing maintenance, and acts of care — and proposes that within the Australian built environment, repair must come first. An essential text for anyone working at the intersection of architecture, ecology, and social justice.
Key Features
- 248 pages of essays, projects, and cross-disciplinary contributions spanning practice, theory, and pedagogy
- Edited by Hélène Frichot, Lucy Benjamin, and Virginia Mannering; contributions from Sophie Adsett, Matthew Bird, Geoff Browne, Linda Tegg, Nicholas Mangan, and more than thirty further contributors
- Published by Perimeter Editions
What You'll Discover
- How repair operates as both a political and material act within the context of colonial dispossession and extractive economies in Australia
- The distinction between repair as emergency response and repair as sustained, everyday practice — maintenance, care, and mending as ongoing obligations
- Whether repair is inherently conservative or whether it can be a site of innovation and transformation within built environment practice
- A wide range of voices — architects, artists, researchers, community groups including Djirri Djirri and Radicle Roots Naarm — modelling what cross-disciplinary reparative work looks like in practice
About the Author
Lucy Benjamin is one of three editors of this collection, alongside Hélène Frichot and Dr Virginia Mannering. Benjamin also contributes a chapter to the volume.
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Pages: 248
- Dimensions: 170 × 240 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9781922545695
- Publisher: Perimeter Editions
- Publication Date: 2026
Perfect For: Architects, designers, and researchers engaged with environmental practice, decolonial theory, and the politics of care within the Australian built environment; students and academics in architecture, urban studies, and cultural geography.