Thrift As a Sustainable Urban Practice? (Re-)Inventing Social Infrastructures and Economies

Mass consumption (or consumerism) presents major challenges to the environment and society, because of the connection to extractive, exploitative industries and excessive waste. Consequently, a vast media commentary and academic literature discusses different types of ethical, reduced/minimalist or sustainable consumption, offering a critique of dominant models of growth-driven capitalism and inequalities within and between societies (Humphery 2013; Colwell 2023; Gregson 2023; Meier 2023). An important strand of literature captures a rekindled interest in thrift, identifying its contemporary ‘reactionary’ or ‘green’ variants (Yates and Hunter 2011: 14-15).

This paper takes up the concept of thrift denoting, broadly, resource/money-saving to examine alternatives to linear/wasteful modes of consumption. However, instead of assigning thriftiness to individual or everyday household economies, we explore thrift in relation to well-established practices of sharing inscribed into the ‘low-budget urbanity’ (Färber 2014) of any city. Drawing on examples of public initiatives based in the cities of Warsaw and Vienna, including public libraries and programs designed to increase circularity and community connectivity, we raise the question if sharing resources makes those communal (sometimes activist) spaces into models for ‘thrifty commoning’.

This paper contributes to the consumption scholarship by dovetailing the ideas of ‘urban commons’ (Özkan & Baykal Büyüksarac 2020; Petrescu et al. 2021, Volont et al. 2022) with the conception of thrift as ‘a condition of thriving’ addressing thrift’s purpose and application in light of ‘present economic, environmental and social challenges’ (Yates and Hunter 2011: 11). We reveal values and operational, infrastructural characteristics of the select initiatives, and advance an empirically-informed theorisation of thrift, centred on the principles of the common good, access and inclusion, for urban thriving and sustainability.