Making repair reparative: Towards expanded geographies of repair

This paper analyzes contemporary scholarship on repair and the reparative in Geography and allied disciplines. We understand the term repair to refer to incremental and everyday forms through which cities, objects, and landscapes are held together through processes of fixing, mending, and maintaining. The related concept of the reparative, with links to the project of reparations, is more expansive, opening up possibilities for action that respond to wider conversations about historical violence and historical debts linked to colonialism and racial capitalism. Exploring contemporary geographical engagements with repair in both the Global North and South, we argue for a closer connection between ideas of repair and the reparative. We understand this as advancing a reparative orientation in scholarship and action that labors both against infrastructural disrepair and the ongoing disposability of racialized lives.