Repair Maps as the start of a collective mapping of repair actors in Europe

Repair Maps is a collective exercise that collects and presents data from professional repair shops, repair cafés and other repair organisations in Europe.

Mapping repair actors

Repair Maps wants to map local repair organisations of different types in the entire project region (North-West Europe). The goals of building this database are multiple:

• Provide citizens an overview of all repair initiatives in their area
• Give visibility to local repair initiatives
• Use the collected data for analytical purposes, contributing in their turn to ao. the European Right to Repair campaign
• Identify the repair initiatives in a unique way, also in other repair platforms and tools (city platforms like LeuvenFixt or HeelApeldoornRepareert, Repair Connects…)

How does it work?

Initial data entry

To launch the first Repair Map, a data collection exercise was conducted by several project partners (Repair Together, Repair & Share, Restarters, cities of Leuven, Roeselare, Apeldoorn, Ottignies-Louvain-la-Neuve...). Visits of repair businesses and repair cafés were combined with desk research to get a first representative overview of repair actors in dedicated regions.

Crowdsourcing repair data

Of course, the list of repair organisations on the map is not complete. Repair Maps wants to engage local repair actors and citizens to add more points-of-interest on the map, and to suggest corrections to existing locations if needed. Together, we can keep the overview up-to-date.

Towards a shared dataplatform for repair

Open Repair Data Platform

When surfing to Repair Maps, you'll only see what's at the surface. Looking forward, this mapping exercise wants to be the start of a collective exercise where different organisations can be identified on a broad scale, and linked to those metadata that are relevant in our domain of repair. 

The map on your website?

One of the purposes of this map is that it can easily be applied and used in all sorts of context. 
Therefore, apart from in the central Repair Maps platform where the map is surrounded by its full functionality (e.g. suggest new locations, suggest corrections to the map), the map itself can be embedded in different contexts. 

A Vue Component and an API connection to the Repair Maps database is available for partners who wish to use and apply the map in a certain way. For example: in the city platforms like LeuvenFixt, the map shows all actors in Leuven, and citizens of Leuven can also register the repairs they did with the help of the local professional repairers. 

For more simple purposes, the map can also be embedded as an iframe into any website. Documentation on how this works can be found here.