Repair as repopulating the devastated desert of our political and social imaginations

In this concluding contribution, I reflect on the impact of post-2008 crises in Southern Europe, which have rekindled tropes of backwardness and a slight orientalism. These narratives often frame the region through a particular poetics of infrastructure, positioning it simultaneously as a leisure resort and a violent border-maker for Fortress Europe. Against the scalar, modernist ontologies of neoliberal governance and debt, I argue that the works in this volume offer vital alternative accounts. Central to this reflection is the nuance of the verb reparar. Beyond merely fixing what is broken, reparar implies observing and paying attention to the distinct nuances of different collectives. By focusing on these reparative practices—ranging from urban activism to the retrieval of ancient legacies—the anthology disputes the traditional definition of welfare. This represents a reinvention of the welfare society rooted in hope rather than disaster. Ultimately, these small-scale experiments serve to repopulate our devastated imaginations, moving away from the path-dependency of austerity toward new, yet-to-be-defined modes of togetherness.