Credit: Cléo Mieulet
“The survival of our civilisation depends on whether we manage to organise ourselves into effective and strong groups.”
—Nick Osborne, Transition Town Movement
This more than ten-year-old quote from the Transition Town movement is still leading the path for us: community organizer Cléo Mieulet and designer Max Mauracher, both strategists and advocates for degrowth. We had long been exploring how to make local circularity tangible—beyond theory, beyond policy—in the daily lives of people. What would it mean to truly organize around sufficiency, cooperation, and mutual aid? How can neighborhoods become resilient—not in concept, but in concrete terms?
This was the seed for the first Kreisler, a space of community repair and share in Berlin’s Gropiusstadt that has since grown from an experiment into a scalable, open-source infrastructure for local resilience. Blending grassroots organizing with strategic systems thinking, Kreisler offers a hands-on response to the crises of overconsumption, social isolation, and infrastructural neglect. It’s not just a project; it’s an evolving adventure in collective self-organization—rooted in repair, strengthened by solidarity, and animated by the belief that another economy is not only possible, but also already under construction.
The term Kreisler is derived from the Austrian word Greißler, meaning a village corner shop—a small-scale, familiar provisioning point. With a playful twist, the “K” in Kreisler signals Kreislaufwirtschaft, the German term for circular economy. But unlike dominant interpretations of circularity—which often focus narrowly on green tech, recycling loops, and product lifecycles—Kreisler associations apply a critical and social understanding of circularity: not only about keeping materials in use, but also about rethinking provisioning systems, strengthening community autonomy and skills, as well as reducing dependency on extractive, linear supply chains.
Kreisler associations (Kreisler) are spaces where everyday needs—repairing, borrowing, learning, and helping—are met collectively. Kreisler are community-driven, meaning that decisions are made by the people who use and run them. This includes direct democratic governance through the active members of the Kreisler association, in accordance with sociocratic principles. A hybrid team of around twelve people combining volunteers and employees runs the association. The initiative is financed through community-supported economy : members contribute (of course income-related) regularly and thus collectively fund the running of the Kreisler.
Currently based in Berlin, the members of the first Kreisler developed a strategy of social franchise to grow into a federated network—each Kreisler locally adapted, but sharing resources, branding, and operational experience. These are the first building blocks of a landscape of circularity hubs, focused on meeting provisioning needs through independent, social infrastructure.
Kreisler associations are transforming vacant commercial infrastructures, using them for the common good and local basic need supply. Let's claim these empty falling shopping malls everywhere! There are millions of square meters of emptied commercial spaces in every city, ready to be taken. In contrast to classical repair cafés in Germany, which tend to be pop-up events driven by volunteers, Kreisler tends to be open nearly as long as regular retail shops. This extended accessibility is made possible by a model where neighbors take shifts to keep the space running. The visibility of the physical location—a former only-profit-making shop in a central and highly frequented area—makes the act of bringing a broken item as natural and integrated as a trip to the bakery after work.
This shift from event to permanent infrastructure is essential and a real innovation in the German repair movement. Repair no longer remains a niche activity reserved for the well-informed but becomes part of the everyday routine. Crucially, Kreisler allows people to choose their level of involvement. While many come to learn how to repair alongside skilled volunteers, others can simply drop off a broken device and return two weeks later to pick it up—repaired by the team. In this way, Kreisler accommodates all levels of engagement—from curiosity to deep involvement —and balances educational intent with practical service, ensuring access even for those lacking time, confidence, or interest in hands-on repair.
Kreisler’s economic model is based on Community Supported Economy—CSX. Similar to Community-Supported Agriculture (CS meaning Community-Supported Everything Else) in food systems, members collectively fund operations through income-related, regular contributions. This form of co-financing is more than practical—it creates a sense of co-ownership, meaning shared responsibility and agency rather than passive consumption. Unlike traditional service models, where customers expect value in return for payment, CSX participants co-shape the ecosystem they are part of. They are not just “users” but stakeholders in the commons. This way of financing is also offering a path to get out of the dependency of state or private-funded subsidies.
Decision-making at the club level is carried out through regular plenaries and working groups, while the overarching association guides strategic developments with a direct democratic structure, based on sociocracy, regularly offering space for newbies to engage as well as providing full financial transparency.
The first Kreisler opened in Berlin’s Gropiusstadt, a neighborhood marked by high diversity and socio-economic challenges. It was here that the model proved its viability—not as a boutique sustainability project, but as a community necessity. The vision now is to replicate this model through a “social franchise”: a shared name and ethos that different neighborhoods can adopt and adapt. Richer districts could host Kreislers that cross-finance those in less affluent areas, thus weaving a decentralized but interdependent network of sufficiency spaces across urban areas.
This idea of a franchise may seem counterintuitive in a post-capitalist context, where the term typically evokes centralized control and market expansion. But in the case of Kreisler, it is reimagined as a tool for commons-based horizontal scaling. The goal is not uniformity, but interoperability: local autonomy, coordinated identity, and shared infrastructure. A network of recognizable Kreisler spaces would offer mutual support, knowledge exchange, and increased political and public visibility. It would also allow for collective lobbying power—essential in ensuring that rights such as the “Right to Repair,” already adopted at EU legislative level, move from policy to daily reality.
In short, the franchise model could help overcome the fragility of isolated grassroots initiatives. While “small is beautiful,” small can also be precarious. A federated structure of Kreisler clubs strengthens resilience without losing the spirit of localism. It enables repair and sharing not just to survive, but also to thrive and scale out (creating more spaces throughout the landscape instead of scaling up to make a few people richer) and in depth (within its community)—quietly transforming urban life from below .
Each Kreisler is more than a service point—it is a learning space for practical skills that have been too long underrated in capitalism, it is a social and educational infrastructure that supports multiple activities:
A particularly forward-looking aspect is the collaboration with an association dedicated to disaster preparedness and civil resilience, focusing on scenarios such as power outages or water shortages. This partnership acknowledges the reality of the polycrisis—interconnected risks spanning ecological, economic, and political domains—and the growing fragility of urban infrastructure. Kreisler, in this sense, also functions as a crisis response hub: a space for learning and community exchange about practical survival, mutual aid, and local organizing in times of breakdown. Some workshops reflect on urgent questions: What happens when public infrastructure fails? When resources become scarce? When the democratic space narrows? In such contexts, neighborhood organizing becomes not just helpful, but essential. It provides a grounded response to government inaction and an incubator for solidarity-based public services, beyond market logic and outside rigid state structures, preparing residents not just for acute disruptions but for long-term transformation.
Despite its promise, the Kreisler movement faces structural challenges: insufficient institutional support, rigid funding systems, and a policy landscape that still favors linear economic models. Still, by mobilizing citizen participation and neighborhood knowledge, Kreisler builds bridges where institutions falter. It demonstrates how post-growth infrastructures can emerge from below, and how ordinary people—through repair, sharing, and mutual support—can reshape the urban fabric toward resilience and justice.
By embedding degrowth principles in local, everyday practice, Kreisler associations offer a vision for urban provisioning beyond extraction and individualism and toward a communal, crisis-resilient future. They remind us that real change does not always begin with big declarations—but often with small tools, shared stories, and neighbors coming together to fix what’s broken. It is already happening, one broken toaster, one neighborly shift, and one shared decision at a time.
This article is the last of a degrowth.info series on movements for social and environmental justice worldwide. Find out more and read the other pieces of the series here.
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