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Paper short abstract

Using ideas from STS and History of Technology, this paper investigates repair and building overlaps in engineering innovation within mature infrastructure systems. These interactions are explored through examples from Great Britain's Railway system around its privatisation in the 1990s.

Paper long abstract

Mature infrastructure systems combine engineering intensive settings and with socio-technical systems shaped by continuing embodiment of material technologies of the past. These layered, and persistently physically installed, technological systems present an interesting form of engineering innovation where removal/renewal of the old can be important in extending or updating technology.

Discussing repair and maintenance considering modern cities, Graham and Thrift (2007) reference a range of networked infrastructure systems and also highlight a range of overlaps between advancing/innovating systems and repair/maintenance. These include breakdown rendering the invisible visible (Leigh-Star, 1999) and maintenance and repair as a learning activities (Brand, 1994).

This paper draws on work from STS and History of Technology to investigate engineering innovation and examples of repair and building overlaps in mature infrastructure systems. Thomas Hughes’s (1983; 1987) studies on Large (socio-)Technical Systems (LTS) and system-building and Arthur’s (2009) discussion of engineering to understand technology change, capture aspects of engineering innovation that can be extended mature infrastructure systems (e.g. Summerton, 1994; Sovacool et al. 2018; Bolton et al., 2019). Edgerton’s (2007) emphasis on embodiment and installations of technological systems provides additional insight.

These theoretical perspectives are explored through examples from Great Britain’s Railway system around the period of its privatisation in the 1990s. Nearing 200 years old, this was a mature infrastructure system continuing to be remade which was then reconfigured through privatisation and reorganisation. Tracing system development activities around this period highlights the importance of engineering interactions, and, within these, interesting connections between breakdown/repair and renewal/redevelopment.

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We develop co-agency to explain how heterogeneous factors shape repair and construction in densification, embedding engineering practices in their sociomaterial context. This is supported by findings from expert deliberation on the alignment of adaptation measures with practical constraints.

Paper long abstract

Urban densification is a hybrid process that draws on sociomaterial histories to transform existing buildings toward a more resilient future. It links repair and construction, as the building stock is at once framed as fragile matter determined by past decisions, and as an invaluable resource for adaptation to sociopolitical aspirations. Densification encompasses large-scale interventions that recreate areas, deleting material histories, as well as small-scale measures that preserve structures while transforming their characteristics, uses, and social embedding. It reassembles materials, people, and places (McFarlane, 2020), leading to disparate developments that highlight the fragility and heterogeneity of buildings (Denis & Pontille, 2020, 2023). Whether buildings are maintained, expanded, or demolished, and with what consequences, is a sociotechnical process dependent on conflicting interests and contextual factors.

This contribution investigates how factors like regulations, financing, sociodemographics, infrastructure, and material characteristics shape the relationship between construction and repair in densification. It develops the concept of co-agency to explain how combined, heterogeneous agencies limit and redirect interventions into the built environment, producing unintended consequences for social and environmental justice, including segregation, displacement, waste, and destruction. This approach embeds engineering practices in their sociomaterial context, pointing out constraints on potential action.

Empirically, it draws on group discussions with German experts in planning, architecture, and research, revealing the ambivalent compromises practitioners navigate when aligning sociopolitical requirements for building stock adaptation with regulatory, institutional, and financial constraints. To them, the relationship between repair and construction involves situated negotiations over what should be preserved or changed, and what is feasible.

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Tempelhof Airport in Berlin is a massive heritage building under constant adaptation. Drawing on planning documents, guidelines, and interviews, this paper shows how fire safety, climate systems, and event infrastructure reshape the building. It argues that maintenance is continuous construction.

Paper long abstract

The Tempelhof Airport building in Berlin is one of the largest existing buildings in Europe. Constructed in the late 1930s as part of the monumental architecture of the National Socialist regime, the building later became globally known during the Berlin Airlift and subsequently operated as a civilian airport until its closure in 2008. Today, the complex is protected as a national heritage site while simultaneously serving as a venue for cultural events, temporary uses, refugee accommodation, and public programs. These overlapping historical, political, and regulatory layers create fundamental challenges for its contemporary use and transformation.

Drawing on access to planning documents, and transformation guidelines, and interviews, this paper examines how the former Tempelhof Airport is continuously reshaped through practices typically classified as maintenance or repair. Fire safety regulations, climate conditioning requirements, and event infrastructure standards necessitate ongoing adjustments to the building. Rather than restoring a stable past state, these interventions enable new uses and redefine what the building can do.

The paper argues that, in the case of Tempelhof Airport, maintenance operates as a mode of construction. Architectural guidelines function as scripts for incremental transformations that allow the building to accommodate evolving regulatory and programmatic demands. By analyzing these processes, the paper conceptualizes Tempelhof as a layered socio-technical network whose present form emerges from accumulated cycles of repair, negotiation, and adaptation. In doing so, it contributes to STS discussions of repair and infrastructure by showing how large heritage buildings are continuously rebuilt through maintenance practices that shape their possible futures.

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The paper examines the politics of delay in street transformations through ethnographic research in Berlin. Drawing on the "never-ending" construction site, it proposes "The Delay" as a temporal figure through which ecological, political, and material tensions of urban change become visible.

Paper long abstract

Streets are critical zones of the urban fabric. The promise of connectivity once linked to the modern street is now being challenged or falling into decay (Anand et al., 2018; Silver, 2021). In response, citizen movements and city governments have increasingly initiated street redesign projects. Yet even after such projects are approved, the temporal and material consequences of dismantling the socio-technical entanglements that constitute existing street infrastructures remain poorly understood. The transition from the street of the past to the envisioned street of the future is anything but frictionless (Tsing, 2005). Indeed, drawing on the image of the "never-ending" construction site, this paper argues that the temporalities and causal logics of urban change become opaque once reconstruction begins, as environmental conditions, human and non-human life, laws, and materials converge in what is here termed "The Delay" — a figure through which the ecological, political, and material tensions of urban change are rendered visible (Farías et al., 2023). Based on ethnographic research with a group of neighbors affected by a construction site in Berlin's district of Neukölln, as part of a larger urban renewal project, and at the construction site itself, this paper attends to how delays unveil the entangled processes of construction, maintenance, and repair as they are lived, negotiated, and contested (Denis & Pontille, 2025).

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Based on qualitative interviews with heritage authorities, energy consultants, and planners, this paper analyses energy retrofits of historic buildings as practices that connect repair and construction and shape both past and future.

Paper long abstract

Energy retrofits of historic buildings are often described either as conservation (repairing the past) or as sustainability measures (building the future). This paper argues that in practice, these activities are closely connected, particularly in the context of current sustainability and circularity agendas.

The analysis draws on qualitative interviews with heritage authorities, energy consultants, architects, and municipal planners. It examines how decisions are made in retrofit projects and how different professional perspectives influence these processes. Heritage authorities tend to focus on material continuity and reversibility, while engineering approaches emphasize energy performance and compliance with technical standards.

Energy retrofits work within existing material, legal, and cultural conditions. They do not begin from a blank state but adapt and transform what is already there. In this sense, construction appears as an incremental practice that often relies on repair. At the same time, repair activities contribute to shaping future building performance and long-term resource use.

By examining institutional and material frictions in retrofit projects, the paper shows how repair and construction are practically connected. It contributes to STS discussions on repair and maintenance by linking them to architectural and engineering practice. A better understanding of these connections can support collaboration in projects that aim to improve energy performance while maintaining historical fabric.

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Paper short abstract

CCS-based decarbonization through retrofitting can be interpreted as a form of repair that seeks to future-proof current carbon-intensive assets, such as cement production. Yet, tracing the ongoing work of rearticulation that supports its material politics reveals a process fraught with frictions.

Paper long abstract

As climate policies aimed at reducing atmospheric CO2 concentrations pose a significant challenge to the continuing operation of global energy and industrial systems, increasing attention is being directed toward strategies to avoid stranding. Particularly, decarbonization through retrofitting – i.e. the transformation rather than the complete replacement of carbon-intensive infrastructures – is gaining increasing prominence. As an “ontological oxymoron” that attempts to bridge timelines (Howe et al., 2016, p. 553), retrofitting can be interpreted as a particular form of repair (Knuth, 2019) aimed at maintaining the infrastructures of the present – both established and inherited – in time (Velkova, 2023).

Among alternatives suited for decarbonization through retrofitting, carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies are gaining traction in industrialized countries as a non-disruptive mitigation option: their core promise indeed lies in reducing CO2 emissions while safeguarding hard-to-decarbonize activities. In so doing, it future-proofs current industrial logics and assets (Mah, 2021) and conveys a particular ecomodernist and “reactionist” future (Vishmidt, 2020).

In June 2025, the world’s first industrial-scale CCS project in the cement industry officially went into operation at Heidelberg Materials’ plant in Brevik (Norway). Building on empirical research conducted during the commissioning phase of this retrofit, I will unfold the material-semiotic work of rearticulation that supports both its technical integration and the construction of a shared grammar between different work cultures and epistemologies. Tracing ongoing processes of rearticulations, I argue, in turn reveals how performing and stabilizing carbon’s material politics (Barry, 2013) is fraught with frictions (Tsing, 2005) that order industrial futures-in-the-making.

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This paper explores how building and repairing intersect in nuclear power plants. It highlights the ambivalence between design choices and repair practices, emphasizing workers’ knowledge and techniques in shaping the reliability and safety of nuclear power plants.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines nuclear power plants as a site where building and repairing become deeply entangled. While contemporary debates on nuclear’s role in the energy transition tend to focus on new reactor construction, the continued operation and safety of existing plants depend on extensive, often invisible repair practices. Indeed, today’s reactors are increasingly facing mundane failures. Drawing from examples from the US, France, Sweden, and the UK, I argue that the relationship between construction and repairing in the nuclear industry is ambivalent. On the one hand, maintenance is inseparable from reactor design and construction. Certain design choices have historically made inspections and repairs difficult and hazardous, contributing to the risk of a nuclear accident. Moreover, components sometimes had to be repaired before construction was even finished. On the other hand, repairs impact the reliability and safety of nuclear power plants also in ways that are unrelated to the construction process itself. Here, the paper pays particular attention to the agency of the repair workers. The practical knowledge or “techniques” of plant workers impacts the reliability and safety of nuclear installations. As plant lifetimes are extended far beyond their original specifications, workers’ procedural knowledge, improvised techniques, and risk assessments actively shape nuclear energy production. By analyzing this ambivalence, the paper contributes to rethinking the relationship between building and repairing. It argues that resilient futures in high-risk infrastructures depend on how reactor designers determine repair practices, but also on how workers continuously reconstruct the material and social conditions of technological systems.

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Paper short abstract

The building of industrial infrastructure involves environmental destruction. Starting from this tension, I propose the concept of 'unbuilding' as a conceptual bridge between building and repairing, as well as for understanding the temporal politics of responding to environmental crises.

Paper long abstract

As Charlotte Malterre-Barthes states in the very first sentence of her new book A Moraturium on New Construction: "To build is also to destroy." The productivist successes of modernity are coming back to haunt us in the form of waste, rising CO₂ concentrations, and exceeded tipping points.

This tension between building and destruction is incisive for the relation between building and repairing. From the perspective of the sociology of time, industrial infrastructure can be understood not only as physical construction but as the construction of temporal structures. In contrast to pre-modern conceptions of cyclical time, industrial infrastructure introduced the arrow of time — economic growth, societal progress, but also the thermodynamic drive towards waste and increasing entropy. The effects and latencies of this infrastructure colonize the future, its continued operation priced into climate models as if this future were already written.

This paper proposes "unbuilding" as a concept that bridges building and repairing. Unbuilding — the dismantling of a dam, the decommissioning of a coal power plant, or the removal of freeways — highlights processes that open possibilities to build more sustainable infrastructure, or to restore and repair ecosystems. By developing this concept, I aim to raise productive questions about the possibilities and limits of repairing environments, the resources and competing interests involved in unbuilding, as well as the political ecology of who has the means to unbuild — questions that echo the practical challenges of mitigating environmental destruction while also orienting us towards the concrete possibilities of other futures.

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This paper examines how building parts become reusable through practices of “unbuilding.” Based on ethnographic observations of asbestos removal, it shows how cleaning and repair practices transform materials and blur the boundaries between construction and demolition.

Paper long abstract

In this proposal, I argue that an ethnographic account of reusing building parts renders visible how practices of repair blur the lines between construction and demolition. At the center of these observations is an old building under deconstruction and the cleaning practices involved in removing asbestos from materials intended for reuse in a new building. These practices fall somewhere between the making of a new building (Mommersteeg 2023) and preserving materiality through repair and maintenance after their artefactual status has been established (e.g. Edensor 2011).

I propose that reuse practices foreground this intersection of construction and repair through “unbuilding” a building (Cairns and Jacobs 2014) and through investigating practices that pull buildings apart (Jacobs et al. 2008). I exemplify this idea with ethnographic observations of a specific moment in an architectural project in which construction and deconstruction are entangled through renegotiating the presence of past materials for future use: the determination and removal of asbestos.

I interpret asbestos removal as a form of cleaning and thus of repair (Edensor 2011: 246; Graham and Thrift 2007) that transforms the building into a site of material negotiation: an iteration of a building under deconstruction, a site of material investigation and separation (Lynch 2022; Siscarenco 2025). These practices show how building parts that were never intended to be reused may bcome usable again. In doing so, they raise the question of how and what forms of order are maintained or transformed through processes of unbuilding and taking buildings apart.

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Efforts to extend building life reveal the limits of defining repair as restoration. In construction practice, adaptation and modernization sustain structural continuity and question distinctions between repairing and building.

Paper long abstract

Professional and regulatory frameworks commonly define repair as restoring a predefined condition – a definition that stabilizes continuity as preserving what already exists. In the management of buildings, it forms part of maintenance regimes aimed at stabilizing an established state. Regulatory distinctions reinforce this logic by separating maintenance and repair from modernization, conversion or extension, which are classified as building practices.

This distinction shapes legal, financial and professional practice, influencing tenancy law, cost allocation and the remuneration of planning and engineering services. By anchoring repair to preserving a predefined state, continuity is equated with maintaining existing conditions. Yet this paper argues that under changing functional, technical or regulatory requirements, strict adherence to an earlier state may endanger a building’s continued use. A physical structure that cannot accommodate new demands risks obsolescence rather than preservation. Maintaining continuity may therefore require interventions that exceed traditional notions of repair.

In construction practice, however, the boundary between repairing and building is already less clear-cut. Many modernization or extension projects retain primary structural systems and substantial existing fabric while adapting buildings to new spatial or functional configurations. Demolition is avoided not by freezing a building in its original state, but by reworking and integrating existing structures.

If repair is understood as preventing material loss and enabling structural continuity rather than merely reinstating a former condition, adaptation and modernization can be recognized as extended modes of repair. Repair thus emerges not as the opposite of construction, but as a mode of constructing material continuity over time.

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This paper examines circular construction as a form of repair. Through stakeholder interactions, study of demolition flows and design-led reuse experiments, it explores how digital craft and classification practices reshape how discarded materials are reassembled into future building practices.

Paper long abstract

Demolition is commonly framed as the endpoint of buildings, where materials enter waste streams and are processed through recycling infrastructures. Within emerging circular construction debates, however, reuse practices increasingly challenge this linear framing by attempting to reintegrate discarded materials into new building processes. This paper examines how such practices can be understood as forms of repair of urban material stocks.

Focusing on reclaimed brick flows in Hamburg, the study investigates how construction and demolition waste (CDW) is defined, classified, and circulated within existing recycling systems. Although Germany reports high recycling rates, many reclaimed bricks are downcycled due to irregular geometries, mortar residues, and regulatory classifications that limit direct reuse. Drawing on interviews with authorities, policy makers, demolition actors, recycling facilities, and design practitioners, the research traces how definitions of recycling and reuse are negotiated across institutional, regulatory, and professional contexts.

Alongside this investigation, the paper presents design-led experiments exploring digitally fabricated systems for irregular reclaimed bricks. These experiments are to test how digital craft based workflows can adapt assembly logics to non-standard materials and support reversible strategies.

Rather than presenting prototyping as a purely technical solution, the study approaches experimentation as a mediating practice that exposes tensions between material properties, regulatory categories, and professional routines. The paper argues that circular construction can be understood as building through repair, where the reassembly of demolition materials reconfigures both urban material flows and the socio-technical practices through which construction futures are assembled.