Robert Crocker - Subverting Consumerism: Reuse in an Accelerated World

Reuse in an Accelerated World

There is now a widespread interest in reuse in many domains, from opera houses built over old warehouses, to vintage clothes and everyday goods incorporating repurposed materials or parts. Despite its ubiquity, this extensive creative work is typically seen in narrowly environmental terms, as a means of reducing carbon, resource use or waste. However, as this volume shows, reuse also has aesthetic and cultural dimensions and a rich social currency, invoked to consciously subvert the accelerated consumer culture responsible for our unfolding environmental crisis.

In three parts, the essays in this book consider reuse in terms of values, aesthetics and meaning, its application in contemporary urban and spatial settings, and the revival of social practices involving a more conscious recourse to reuse and repair. These are bookended by the editors essays: the first, on the significant relationship between reuse and technological and social acceleration evident in the surrounding consumer society; and the last, on the multiple forms of reuse deployed in a contemporary alternative building practice, and their contributions to presenting alternative ways of living in the world.

Challenging dominant understandings of waste and consumption, Subverting Consumerism shows how reuse has become a means for many to creatively engage with the past, and to discover a continuity and sense of place eroded by the accelerative regimes of contemporary consumerism. Becoming a means of resistance, and offering a range of aesthetic, social and economic possibilities, reuse can be found to subvert and challenge the obsessive quest for the new found in contemporary consumerism.

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 Elses Problem: Consumerism, Sustainability and Design (Greenleaf/Routledge 2016).

Keri Chiveralls (PhD.) is the Discipline Lead and Head of Course for the first full degree postgraduate courses offered in Permaculture Design at CQUniversity. She teaches in permaculture and related topics and 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. This is her first co-edited book publication.

Series Editors: Anthony Elliott and Jennifer Rutherford

Hawke Research Institute, University of South Australia

This series addresses the importance of innovative contemporary, comparative and conceptual research on the cultural and institutional contradictions of our times and our lives in these times. Antinomies publishes theoretically innovative work that critically examines the ways in which social, cultural, political and aesthetic change is rendered visible in the global age, and that is attentive to novel contradictions arising from global transformations. Books in the Series are from authors both well-established and early careers researchers. Authors will be recruited from many, diverse countries but a particular feature of the Series will be its strong focus on research from Asia and Australasia. The Series addresses the diverse signatures of contemporary global contradictions, and as such seeks to promote novel transdisciplinary understandings in the humanities, social sciences and creative arts.

The Series Editors are especially interested in publishing books in the following areas that fit with the broad remit of the series:

• New architectures of subjectivity
• Cultural sociology
• Reinvention of cities and urban transformations
• Digital life and the post-human
• Emerging forms of global creative practice
• Culture and the aesthetic

Culture, Identity and Intense Performativity

Being in the Zone

Edited by Tim Jordan, Brigid McClure and Kath Woodward

Subverting Consumerism

Reuse in an Accelerated World

Edited by Robert Crocker and Keri Chiveralls

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/Antinomies/book-series/ANTIMN.

Edited by Robert Crocker and Keri Chiveralls

First published 2018
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2018 selection and editorial matter, Robert Crocker and Keri Chiveralls; individual chapters, the contributors

The right of Robert Crocker and Keri Chiveralls to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Crocker, Robert, 1952 editor. | Chiveralls, Keri, 1979 editor.

Title: Subverting consumerism : reuse in an accelerated world / edited by Robert Crocker and Keri Chiveralls.

Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2018.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018006777 | ISBN 9781138189096 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781315641812 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Consumption (Economics)Social aspects. | Environmentalism. | Sustainable urban development. | Recycling (Waste, etc.)Social aspects.

Classification: LCC HC79.C6 S83 2018 | DDC 306.3dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018006777

ISBN: 978-1-138-18909-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-64181-2 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman
by Apex CoVantage, LLC