Contributory Economies,

This paper will deploy French philosopher Bernard Stiegler’s neo-Marxist notion of the contributory economy to explore conceptions and practices of ‘DIY (Do It Yourself) urbanism’, with a specific focus on disused interior spaces. Reference will be made to contemporary design and architectural discourses on DIY urbanism and design activism, particularly in relation to the Renew Newcastle scheme in Newcastle, Australia. Although Renew is now a recognised model for urban regeneration, it began in 2008 as a socially-orientated experiment within the unoccupied shopfronts and tenancies of this rapidly transforming post-industrial city. Its DIY urbanism occurs alongside established institutional and commercial entities and as such, it could be superficially understood as an extension of, rather than an alternative to, mainstream project procurement models. Here, Stiegler’s invocations of contributory economies, driven by an ethic of care or cura, suggest a way of understanding Renew Newcastle’s urbanism as a participatory economy coexistent with the same capitalistic economy that prompted the urban decline it addresses. this dramatic change placed the city in a state of flux. By the turn of the millennium, and despite the growth of newly developed regions around the city, Newcastle’s central business district remained in decline due to speculative investment patterns and movements of capital away from its traditional centres of economic and cultural stability. Many retail tenancies shifted from their former CBD locations to new peripheral suburban developments, effectuating an evacuation of Newcastle’s inner city generally, and the main street (Hunter Street) specifically.4 Even so, the dereliction and abandonment that ensued spurned new modes of occupation and participatory models of economic activity. The temporary reoccupation of empty retail and commercial spaces in the CBD facilitated by the Renew Newcastle scheme during the last five years is an example of design activism transforming the failures of the spaces of capitalism into alternative modes of architectural and spatial practice: modes not unique to Newcastle, but certainly endemic to it. With this in mind, and in response to this journal’s theme of ‘Design Activism’, the present paper concerns itself with a particular problematisation of capitalism and a subsequent theorisation of