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Paper short abstract

How to think of the repair of infrastructures that cause environmental destruction? Rather than understanding repair as a harmless concept, I propose looking at processes of unbuilding to emphasize how the things we no longer care for define the things deemed worthy of care and repair.

Paper long abstract

As Charlotte Malterre-Barthes states in the very first sentence of her new book, A Moratorium 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 unbuilding 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.

Repairing such infrastructure is complicit in its destruction and its temporal logic. I propose to understand repair in connection to the unbuilding of infrastructure — the dismantling of a dam, the decommissioning of a coal power plant, or the removal of freeways. I argue that processes of unbuilding can help us understand not only how certain things are deemed repairable while others are not, but also how the unbuilding of infrastructure unveils further needs for repair.