Building the Public: DIY, Repair Practices, and the Politics of Design — Collective Repair, Aesthetic Equality, and the Transfer of Responsibility

This thesis examines when DIY self-building and collective repair generate public capacity, and when they may also involve the transfer of institutional responsibility to participants. Its contribution lies not in claiming to be the first to reveal repair’s political character, but in building on existing repair scholarship to propose a normative analytical framework that distinguishes public capacity from the allocation of responsibility. The first dimension concerns collective decision-making, knowledge-sharing, access to resources, and public recognition; the second asks whether prior responsibilities have changed, who bears additional costs, and whether participants receive corresponding power and resources. Through a dialogue among Hannah Arendt, Jacques Rancière, and Michel Foucault, and drawing on collective repair research and Enzo Mari’s Autoprogettazione? as cases from the literature, the analysis shows that participation and autonomy alone establish neither political emancipation nor the transfer of responsibility. This is a literature-based conceptual analysis. The proposed two-dimensional framework is an analytical tool for future case studies, not a validated scale.