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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.