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Paper short abstract

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).