Subverting Consumerism ─ Reuse in an Accelerated World

The dominant understanding of reuse for sustainability is a technical one, which assumes reuse’s benefits are limited to the new material, energy and emissions avoided by repurposing. But reuse is much more than that. Reuse and repurposing have always been part of the human engagement with objects and spaces. Thus reuse and remaking are important topics in sustainable design, architecture, cultural studies, anthropology, and the sociology, economics and politics of consumption.

Given our current environmental crises and the unsustainable expansion of global consumerism in an age of social and technological acceleration, the social and cultural impact of reuse or repurposing upon consumption practices in everyday life is particularly important.

In design, reuse has more than a symbolic social or cultural value. Reuse protests against and subverts the dominance of a ‘waste-ready’ accelerated newness in contemporary consumerism. Reuse establishes more durable and culturally specific relationships with objects and spaces, and more stable identities at a time of continuous and rapid change.

Subverting Consumerism: Reuse in an Accelerated World is the first book to explore the three major facets of reuse: its meaning and aesthetics, the affects and effects of design for reuse, and reuse as a changing social practice. Drawing on examples from Africa, Europe, North America, Asia and Australia, it engages with ideas and theories informing current reuse practices in our accelerated world and sets the scene for understanding how we are mining the past to reshape the future.

Robert Crocker (DPhil.) teaches the history and theory of design and design for sustainability in the School of Art, Architecture and Design at the University of South Australia, where he is Deputy Director of the China Australia Centre for Sustainable Urban Development. His research is focused on consumption and its contributing role in our environmental crisis. His most recent book is Somebody Else’s Problem: Consumerism, Sustainability and Design (Greenleaf / Routledge 2016).

Keri Chiveralls (PhD.) is the Discipline Lead and Head of Program for the first full degree course offered in Permaculture at CQUniversity. Her research interests are in cultural and environmental anthropology, social movement studies and theories of social change. She received her doctorate in Anthropology/Social Inquiry at the University of Adelaide in 2008. Since then she has published book chapters, journal articles and presented at national and international conferences.