Nearly everyone around the world has done some kind of DIY, at some point in his or her life, in an attempt to improve or fix their home and garden. DIY stores such as Hornbach, Germany, provide the necessary tools to do so.
However, Hornbach’s most recent marketing campaign has adopted the idea of DIY urbanism, a way of fixing up your street or neighborhood in the bid to make it a more pleasant place to live. The video commercials, broadcasted on television in countries like the Netherlands and Germany, features a collective of urban hackers in a Portugese city carrying out several creative interventions to improve parts of their city.
The videos and the campaign suggest that DIY is not just for your home, but also for the area in which you live, scaling up ideas so that they can help improve your local area and bring out that community spirit.
With DIY urbanism becoming increasingly popular, it is perhaps no surprise that DIY chains such as Hornbach are embracing this and trying to provide people with the ideas and the means to do so. Does this commercial campaign reflect the definitive mass popularization of DIY urbanism?