This piece focuses on how curation (as opposed to repair and maintenance) characterizes the ways in which residential groups navigate states of incompletion (Guma 2020) that arise amidst contemporary construction projects in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Unlike practices of repair and maintenance that are more oriented to the preservation of a previous design, curation is oriented to redesign, deconstruction, and reformulation. These acts of curation actively unbuild the priorites and formulations that give rise to systematic incompletion in the first place.

In the district which I call Buyan, swaths of lower to middle-income apartment blocks are being built by a myriad of small-to-medium scale construction companies. Buyan sits within a type of urban “inner fringe” at some distance from the center of Ulaanbaatar. New apartment buildings connected to centrally-provided heating infrastructure originally launched in the socialist era, are interspersed with fenced land plots known as hashaa, often containing older self-built housing (baishin), or ger, collapsible felt dwellings used by Mongolian mobile pastoralists. The presence of both apartments and hashaa land plots present two overlapping urban legacies, a result of different landholders or construction companies attempting to keep or acquire plots of land.

The fast-paced, atomized construction of apartments in Buyan has resulted in unevenly provided public infrastructures and wider unfinished environments. Residents living in these new buildings navigate these unfinished public surrounds. Apartments are built; however, the surrounding areas might have inadequate drainage, or insufficient car access and parking provision. A lack of footpaths linking different areas mean residents often need to walk around fenced, privatized apartment parking areas. Some apartments in atomized enclaves have underground garages, but these garages can often flood in summer rains, resulting in longer-term ground water seepage which residents attribute to a failure of construction companies to provide adequate drainage and sealing. These  environments give rise to accelerated processes of material decay. Unsealed roads erode in daily use, exacerbated by rain and flooding. These public surroundings often present exposed, porous materials, dirt, unsealed concrete garages, and cracked facades on some buildings.

These spaces are also the site of resident-driven attempts at reworking these unfinished surrounds. These adaptations and rearrangements form wide-ranging acts of incremental curation, where residents attempt to rework the surrounding environments into what they believe public spaces and infrastructures should be. Here, curatorial rearrangement does not so much exist alongside repair (Martínez 2017, 349).  It reveals the limits of the conceptual frames of maintenance and repair, given that in this context what is being “repaired” was never fully finished to begin with. In Buyan, residents gather ideas, resources and materials, which are selected, debated over, or purchased (with money raised). Through residents’ actions, this afterlife of atomization is transformed into an overlapping bricolage, a material manifestation of relations that have emerged well beyond the intentions of the construction companies and municipal outsourcing that shaped the neighbourhood.

Since January 2023, I have been periodically undertaking ethnographic research in Buyan among Suuts Ömchlögchdiin Holboo or Apartment Owners’ Associations, hereafter described by their Mongolian acronym, SÖH. SÖH are essentially body corporates of buildings funded by fees paid by apartment owners. They consist of a group of residents—sometimes 2 or 3, but can be up to 10—that ostensibly oversee the management of buildings’ public areas. Some SÖH are quite large—for example, those that take care of several buildings, housing approximately 1,000 residents. Their work includes general (and, within the original remit of construction companies, expected) maintenance, such as replacing radiators in public corridors, fixing broken tiles, or protecting buildings’ internal areas against vandalism. However, given the wider forms of incompletion of public spaces in Buyan, these SÖH are also required to take on the incremental unbuilding of unruly materialities arising from unfinished public infrastructures.

These SÖHs’ work has expanded to fill an important infrastructural gap. SÖH members regularly engage in a variety of urban shaping tasks: draining water from flooded roads and garages, organizing rubbish collection, commissioning the construction of children’s playgrounds, planting trees in public areas, setting up CCTV systems, providing footpath lighting, cementing over cracks appearing in buildings or on steps and laying gravel on unsealed roads as an interim solution. These are also acts of curatorial unbuilding. Residents break a section of a fence surrounding an enclaved parking area to create pedestrian access from one area of the neighbourhood to another. When temporarily sealing a road with gravel, the ground is first smoothed over. This  gravel might provide an interim solution to drainage problems; however, this material itself is porous and prone to further degradation.

Importantly, these curatorial practices produce an incremental unbuilding of the atomisation characteristic of unfinished or incomplete development. Pedestrian paths are laid with bricks linking up previously separate  apartment enclaves; unsealed roads are drained of flood water, temporarily retaining their structural integrity in the lead-up to their hoped-for sealing. Curation thus unbuilds legacies of incompleteness as well as itself forming an unbuilding of previous priorities that had given rise to atomized processes of construction in the first place. It forms a type of purposeful world-making, a material and conceptual reconfiguring of what this environment could become.

Conceiving of this work as a type of socio-material curation gives rise to important considerations that can be applied to thinking through unfinished states across multiple domains. The first is, who decides whether an entity (a house, a neighborhood, or a nation-state) is established and finished, or requires further re-examination or redefinition. The articulation that something is finished can result in the silencing of other possibilities and voices and is highly revealing of wider relations of power, inequalities, and colonial legacies. Sitting with the unfinished and purposefully, incrementally unbuilding what gave rise to it, provides new opportunities for realignment of status quos. It also gives us a fuller picture of the “multiple scales of entanglement” that give rise to unfinished states, and of those who may (or may not) benefit from curatorial transformation and incremental (re)realignment (Thomas 2024, 104).