Mending Place
Elizabeth Kostina explores repair as a form of resistance—an insistence on restoring connections, both to materials and to each other. Elizabeth is a master’s student in historic preservation at Columbia University and a public programs intern at the World Monuments Fund, based in New York. She writes for fun on Substack: https://ekisonline.substack.com/
Emenem uses mosaics to repair cracked pavement.
The crisis of infrastructure is, at its core, a crisis of separation. People have become separated from both the places we inhabit and the tools needed to maintain them. We have built spaces that require endless intervention to remain functional, and the places deemed as low-value suffer from disinvestment and neglect. Repair has become not just a technical necessity but a form of resistance—an insistence on restoring connections, both to materials and to each other.
The physical conditions of U.S. urban landscapes are symptoms of deeper issues: the privatization of public services, the growing economic disparities, and perhaps above all, decades-long underfunding that has caused widespread disrepair of the infrastructure that millions of people rely on. This erosion mirrors what Simone Weil describes as a loss of rootedness — a disconnection between individuals and the shared spaces that once bound communities together. The materials of the modern city resist easy mending; they fracture, rust, and decay in ways that are costly and difficult to repair. The professionalization of repair industries is making everyday acts of urban care seem inaccessible to the average person. This is a crisis of mending the physical and social environments we inhabit and a call to reclaim not just infrastructure, but our relationship to place itself. Urban mending is an antidote to that crisis, rooted in the belief that our environments can be healed, shaped, and stewarded by all who inhabit them.
Six tenets of urban mending
1. We must revisit the social and civic contracts underpinning urban life, fostering care and shared responsibility for public spaces.
Reclaiming place means reclaiming the social ties and responsibilities that sustain shared spaces, transforming neglected corners of the city into cared-for places where people belong. Small-scale, often unpermitted acts of care and repair that breathe life into neglected spaces are being taken up by communities. Urban mending, a term coined by architect Renzo Piano, refers to the practice of repairing and revitalizing the physical and social fabric of neglected urban environments. Originally introduced through his 2021 exhibition “Mending the Suburbs,” Piano emphasized “participatory processes that involve the inhabitants… implementing small construction sites that have the aim of reconnecting the urban tissue.” This notion of urban mending has since evolved into a broader framework that encompasses community-driven interventions that challenge the boundaries of formal infrastructure and policy. It reclaims repair not merely as technical maintenance, but as an expressive, civic act: one that confronts systemic neglect and invites collective care.
Unlike traditional infrastructure fixes, which often aim to erase signs of wear, urban mending transforms damage into an opportunity for a sense of pride in reclaimed spaces, challenging the notion that only governments, developers, or property owners can alter and maintain the public realm. Visible repair functions as a form of storytelling. It embeds narratives of care and resilience into the urban fabric. For example, street mosaics like those created by Ememem (“the Pavement Surgeon”) transform cracked sidewalks into vibrant artworks that celebrate imperfection and invite passersby to reimagine solutions to urban decay. Rachel Sussman’s Sidewalk Kintsukuroi project applies the practice of kintsugi to city sidewalks, honoring the history of a place and celebrating its repaired form. These projects serve as catalysts for collective reflection and action, sparking dialogue about care and stewardship in public spaces.
Rachel Sussman uses kintsugi, a traditional Japanese art form of repairing with gold, to mend cracks in the pavement.
2. Urban mending is fundamentally about mending not only physical damage but also the ruptures in community and belonging.
Ultimately, urban mending is defined not just by public displays of care for the built environment, but also by who participates in the act of repair. Urban mending challenges the notion that public spaces are solely the domain of governments or property owners, encouraging people to reclaim a sense of ownership and responsibility for the places they inhabit. This is not an argument absolving governments of their responsibility to invest in infrastructure; urban mending seems to empower communities to reclaim agency over their environment. By visibly addressing neglect through acts of repair and care, urban mending not only restores physical spaces but also reshapes the relationship between citizens and their cities, fostering shared responsibility without excusing systemic failures. It’s this shared ethic of repair that bridges the personal and the communal, revitalizing both spaces and the relationships within these spaces.
This principle inherent to the movement of urban mending echoes what was once a widespread ethos in textile repair: as with boro (the traditional Japanese textile art form characterized by patching and repairing worn-out fabrics with sashiko stitching), urban mending values sustainability and longevity, reinforcing the idea that repair is not only practical but also a meaningful act of stewardship. Unlike DIY fixes confined to private domains, urban mending tackles public spaces, aiming to benefit the broader community.IPiano’s ‘Mending the Suburbs’ exhibit emphasized participatory processes involving residents and small-scale construction as a way to reconnect the urban fabric, highlighting a shift in architectural practice which emphasizes the importance of community collaboration.Urban mending transforms “I fix my home” into “we heal our neighborhood.”
The Q’eswachaka rope-bridge weavers in Peru offer a model for repair as a collective action. For over 600 years, Quechua communities have come together to weave a 118-foot grass bridge across the Apurimac River, replacing the previous year’s bridge as it sags with age. Using the pliable ichu grass, they create a new bridge through collective effort, celebrating the continuity of tradition while maintaining a vital piece of infrastructure. These practices exemplify the integration of care, community, and resilience—a principle mirrored in modern urban mending, where acts of repair also serve as expressions of cultural and communal stewardship.
Q’eswachaka weavers repair the rope bridge with ichu grass.
3. Mending is a practice of tactical, creative, and biological stewardship.
Urban mending draws inspiration from tactical urbanism’s focus on “low-cost, temporary interventions that improve local neighborhoods,” which fosters grassroots innovation, empowering citizens to take ownership of their urban environments and bypassing bureaucratic processes. Popularized in the early 2010s, tactical urbanism initiatives like pop-up parks, temporary pedestrian zones, and street murals showcase the potential of creative, adaptive solutions to reshape the urban environment. These projects not only encourage municipalities to reconsider outdated policies but also leverage local resources to drive meaningful transformations in public space. By leveraging local resources and working within existing regulatory systems, these projects demonstrate the potential for grassroots initiatives to drive meaningful urban transformations. Ultimately, tactical urbanism fosters community engagement, builds social capital, and at its best, catalyzes longer-term improvements in city infrastructure. While tactical urbanism often seeks to test new ideas for urban design or infrastructure, urban mending prioritizes healing—whether through physical repairs, like filling cracks in sidewalks with art, or symbolic gestures, like yarn bombing. Both movements empower residents to shape their environments, but urban mending emphasizes long-term stewardship over the spaces it touches.
Yarn bombing uses colorful crochet and knit to wrap lampposts, benches, bridges, and trees, turning them into vibrant, tactile artworks. While whimsical on the surface, these interventions often are quiet protests that reclaim cold, hard infrastructure through softness and craft, asserting that public space can be intimate, playful, and expressive. As a medium, yarn bombing subverts expectations: crochet and knitting, traditionally seen as domestic, feminine, and private, are used to claim visibility and space in a realm historically dominated by masculine-coded architecture and policy. Pittsburgh’s Knit the Bridge project exemplified this dynamic, uniting over 1,800 volunteers to cover the Andy Warhol Bridge in panels of fiber art. The installation was not only a celebration of the city’s industrial and artistic heritage but also an act of communal authorship. It transformed a utilitarian structure into a shared canvas, activating social ties across racial, class, and age boundaries.
Seed bombing, like yarn bombing, constitutes a form of grassroots spatial intervention that inserts acts of care and creativity into the urban landscape. While yarn bombing engages the built environment through ephemeral, tactile expression, seed bombing operates on a biological timescale, introducing living matter that may endure and proliferate long after the initial gesture. Both practices reclaim neglected or overlooked spaces, challenging dominant paradigms of control, order, and authorship in the city. Yet seed bombing, rooted in the tactics of guerrilla gardening, carries a different kind of material consequence. It not only decorates but transforms, harnessing natural processes to remediate and reanimate derelict environments. In the 1970s, activists like Liz Christy popularized the practice in New York City, tossing seed bombs into vacant lots and catalyzing the emergence of community gardens. These acts of environmental mending offered aesthetic and ecological value while asserting local agency over urban land.
Yarn bombing in Tring, Hertfordshire, July 5, 2015. Image by Peter O’Connor.
4. The creative act of urban mending reflects a broader movement where communities reclaim neglected spaces in meaningful ways.
Recently, an example of urban mending unfolded in New York, in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. A leaking fire hydrant in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn created a persistent puddle in the sidewalk; infrastructural neglect, left unaddressed by the city for months. One neighbor, Jequan Irving, transformed the space into an impromptu goldfish pond, adding plants, rocks, and fish, turning a symptom of decay into a communal attraction. It became an unexpected oasis in the neighborhood, a gesture of both joy and resistance, reframing urban disrepair as an opportunity for imaginative, collective care.
The pond soon became a site of tension. A woman, citing concerns for the welfare of the fish, “rescued” them, prompting fierce debate among neighbors and online observers. What began as a joyful intervention became a flashpoint for deeper issues: Who gets to decide what care looks like in public space? Who controls the narrative of improvement? These questions were further complicated by the racialized dynamics of the incident: the woman who removed the fish was white; the majority of residents who built and supported the pond were Black. What some saw as animal welfare, others interpreted as a paternalistic intrusion, raising uncomfortable parallels to gentrification, where outside interventions often mask deeper displacements.
Eventually, the city responded by paving over the sidewalk and repairing the hydrant. In doing so, the government reasserted its authority, formalizing the space and erasing the informal creativity that had temporarily flourished. The local government fixed the infrastructure, but at the cost of killing the communal act that brought the site to life. This story illustrates a central tension in urban mending: when do these acts amplify the value of a place, and when do they invite its regulation or erasure? Reclaiming place through repair is never neutral because questions of power, belonging, and control shape who gets to care for, narrate, and define ‘place.’
Neighbors came together to create and tend to the Bed Stuy Aquarium.
5. Repair is not just about fixing objects but about passing on the knowledge of care to foster the next generation of stewards.
RIn the past, repair skills have traditionally been were inherited, shared within families and communities as part of daily life. In modern societyNow, much of that knowledge has been outsourced, hidden behind technical expertise and corporate control. The resurgence of repair workshops — from fixing bicycles to mending clothes and patching walls — reclaims this lost knowledge to some extent. Teaching someone to repair their space is an act of love, a refusal to let people be at the mercy of planned obsolescence or neglect. It transforms repair from an individual chore into a communal act of solidarity, resisting the forces that make people dependent on systems that prioritize profit over preservation. Mattern foregrounds in her essay, Maintenance and Care, the often-invisible labor embedded in maintaining not only physical infrastructures but also the “media infrastructures” that mediate our social and civic worlds, such as libraries, archives, data centers, and communication networks. She emphasizes how these infrastructures are entangled with power, knowledge, and care, arguing that maintenance is an act of stewardship that challenges dominant narratives of innovation and progress. By attending to the “care work” of upkeep and the networks of people, practices, buildings, and technologies involved, Mattern reveals how maintenance practices produce and reproduce civic life itself. In this sense, infrastructure failure is not merely ‘breakdown’ but something that exposes the political and cultural labor required to sustain collective life and memory. These gestures of repair may be small in scale, but they are potent in implication because they provide an unbroken chain of knowledge that is being increasingly gatekept by monopolies, consumers, and proprietors. Mending suggests a model of urbanism that prioritizes care over spectacle, durability over novelty, relation over extraction. Mending insists that the city is not finished, not fixed, not beyond our influence, that it is an ongoing collective project, shaped as much by those who patch a bench or replant a verge as by those who design buildings or draft zoning codes.
6. Urban mending is a radical act of reclamation and vision of civic life animated by care.
Through practices like visible mending, sidewalk mosaics, guerrilla gardening, and the maintenance of improvised infrastructure, residents mark their presence and assert their stake in the fabric of the city. These acts often arise from necessity, but they also reflect a deliberate ethic: that repair is meaningful, that attention matters, and that the city is a shared and malleable commons. As anthropologist Shannon Mattern wrote in Places Journal, “maintenance has taken on new resonance as a theoretical framework, an ethos, a methodology, and a political cause.” In that spirit, mending becomes a way of resisting erasure, both of place and of the people who inhabit it.
Urban mending also operates in quiet opposition to the logic of capitalism. Capitalism thrives on extraction, disposability, and the outsourcing of care, encouraging individuals to replace rather than repair and consume rather than sustain. In contrast, mending demands continuity, attentiveness, and interdependence. A repaired sidewalk mosaic must be respected by pedestrians; yarn bombing must be maintained by community members; goldfish need feeding and protection from the elements. Stewardship is sustained through shared responsibility. In this sense, urban mending carves out space for localized agency, mutual aid, and care economies. While these practices do not replace the need for robust public investment, they demonstrate how collective action can begin to shift the terms of engagement with our built environment from consumers to co-stewards.
Even as urban mending is a bittersweet reflection of systemic neglect, the rise of urban mending is both a testament to community resilience. In cities where public spaces are commodified and infrastructure is increasingly abandoned, urban mending often fills gaps left by privatized, corporate-driven urban landscapes. While these acts of care are vital, they should not serve as stopgap solutions to structural failures. Instead, urban mending should be celebrated as a dynamic force—one that activates community imagination, fosters creativity, and reminds us of the potential for shared care in shaping a better urban future.
Urban mending holds the potential to move beyond reactive responses to neglect and toward becoming a celebratory practice. By centering care and repair in the public realm, it can evolve into a means for communities to connect, express themselves, and transform their environments. The ultimate goal is to create a future where urban mending is not a necessity driven by systemic failure, but a thriving practice of creativity and stewardship, strengthening the bonds between people and the places they call home. Urban mending, however, distinguishes itself by moving beyond temporary or symbolic gestures to foster long-term stewardship. It prioritizes care as a sustained commitment rather than a fleeting intervention, emphasizing the public display of repair and its transformative impact. While art as social commentary plays a role in challenging perceptions, urban mending’s unique power lies in its capacity to embed care and responsibility into the everyday fabric of cities, restoring not only infrastructure but rootedness.
