Repair Manual is a series that explores the sociotechnical transformation poised to reshape design (and much else): the paradigm shift from building the world to repairing the world. “Many of the stories and orders of modernity…are in process of coming apart,” wrote technology scholar Steven J. Jackson in his classic essay, “Rethinking Repair.” The shibboleths of “novelty and invention, open frontiers and endless development” are giving way, he warned, to “fragmentation, dissolution, and breakdown.” Today the exigencies of climate crisis and hyper-capitalism are giving new urgency to Jackson’s predictions—and raising new challenges for the design disciplines. How might professions premised on carbon-hungry growth adapt to an overburdened world in which the maintenance of existing structures and landscapes will be more valuable, environmentally and socially, than the creation of new ones? How might disciplines that reward novelty and speculation find meaning in practices that are reparative and restorative?

Nancy Levinson is editor and executive director of Places Journal. Since arriving at the journal in 2009, she has led its transition from print to digital, advanced the editorial mission of public scholarship, and, in collaboration with Princeton University Press, overseen the launch of Places Books. Previously Levinson was founding director of the Phoenix Urban Research Lab at the Design School at Arizona State University, and before that founding coeditor of Harvard Design Magazine at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She received an MArch from University of Pennsylvania.

Frances Richard is senior editor of Places Journal. She has taught at California College of the Arts and been an editor at Fence and Cabinet. Her writing on visual art and poetry has appeared in Artforum, BOMB, and the Nation. She has been a visiting scholar at the Canadian Centre for Architecture and recipient of a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Richard holds a master’s in creative writing from New York University. Her latest book, Gordon Matta-Clark: Physical Poetics (University of California Press, 2019), was supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation.

Founded in 1983, Places Journal harnesses the power of public scholarship to promote equitable cities, innovative architecture, and resilient landscapes.