Garima Bhardwaj and Saurabh Tewari
The global industrial design paradigm, structured around planned obsolescence and proprietary restriction, perpetuates ecologically destructive cycles of disposability that fall disproportionately on postcolonial Majority World cities. This paper argues that Delhi’s informal repair ecosystem constitutes a sophisticated counter-model: a living, regenerative design intelligence operating outside formal institutional frameworks. Drawing on twelve months of multi-site decolonial ethnography across Nehru Place, Lajpat Nagar, Okhla, and Munirka, the study documents forty street-level practitioners across three material cohorts, technology repairers, leather cobblers (Mochis), and textile darners (Rafoogars), and reframes their interventions as repair-as-design rather than economic necessity.
The research develops two original analytical frameworks: a four-scale spatial anatomy of the repair hub (Object, Thada, Adda, City) and a Relational Nodes Matrix mapping five core repair actions, Repair, Replace, Repurpose, Renew, and Refute, as interrelated design decisions. These are grounded in subcontinental philosophies of material continuity, including Jeernoddhara and critically reappraised jugaad, and situated within pluriversal design theory to challenge Eurocentric assumptions about where design knowledge originates and who produces it.
Findings reveal that practitioners exercise embodied material sovereignty, technically, spatially, and politically, while remaining structurally precarious due to absent institutional recognition. The paper concludes with three policy propositions: intellectual property reform to protect component-level repair, designation of permanent Urban Repair Sanctuaries in municipal planning, and the establishment of publicly supported Open Material Repositories. Together, these aim to protect, rather than co-opt, informal repair ecologies as irreplaceable nodes of urban resilience and intergenerational knowledge.
Keywords: Decolonial ethnography, Repair ecosystem, Regenerative knowledge, Delhi