Making Civic Crafts

By Otto von Busch, Helena Hansson, Karl Hallberg

In a time of growing loneliness, polarization, and civic disengagement, Making Civic Crafts offers a powerful and hopeful alternative: build things together. Drawing on workshops, teaching experiments, and collaborative construction projects, Otto von Busch, Karl Hallberg, and Helena Hansson show how shared making can cultivate agency, care, responsibility, and democratic participation. From snow forts and coffee carts to benches and communal tools, the book reveals how even modest acts of collective craft can create belonging, strengthen communities, and bring people into meaningful public life. Blending craft theory, political thought, and hands-on pedagogy, Making Civic Crafts reimagines craft as more than a creative practice--it is a tool for civic renewal. Engaging, accessible, and deeply relevant, this book invites readers to see civics not as an abstract system, but as something we make together. Here, craft is so much more than a do-it-yourself activity. It is a superpower for building community, one project, one relationship, and one shared endeavor at a time.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1956313508
• ISBN13: 9781956313505
• Release Date: October 2026
• Publisher: RIT Cary Graphic Arts Press
• Length: 150 Pages