Servicing bikes, serving community: Exploring community-before-profit in cycle repair worker co-operatives

This paper starts from the critique, put forth by social and solidarity economy and post-growth scholarship, that the prevailing circular economic (CE) agenda reproduces central capitalist features like the pursuit of economic growth and technocratic resource management. As it has been argued, these features problematically undercut socio-ecological objectives such as material sufficiency, social wellbeing, and democratic control over resources. As ‘engines’ of the economy, however, enterprises may structure themselves and carry out activities in ways that challenge — or at least avoid reproducing — these capitalist logics, with co-operatives being a key example. This paper presents qualitative fieldwork with not-for-profit worker co-operatives focused on cycle repair and guided by post-growth values of community wellbeing and participation, economic democracy and justice, and ecological sustainability. It reflects on how these co-operatives leverage circularity to serve and build their communities, and how communities support circular resource management in cycle repair. The study also highlights pressures on the co-operatives’ activities and trade‑offs between workers’ economic interests and other socio-ecological interests. It concludes by suggesting avenues for practitioners to strengthen relations between cycle repair co-operatives and communities.