Confronted with the crumbling legacy of twentieth-century infrastructures, the toxic effects of extractive and manufacturing industries, and the shadow futures of new investments, we are facing the urgent question of how to unbuild worlds. Every act of making is foreshadowed by a simultaneous unmaking, demanding a requirement to rethink intentional acts of design in terms of their entanglement in a broader set of ecological relations. Here, we seek to open up an anthropological attention to “unbuilding” and to craft a conceptual lexicon to aid us in describing and interrogating these dynamics. This series brings together contributions that explore unbuilding across diverse sites and contexts. Collectively, they interrogate what unbuilding entails—empirically, theoretically, and politically.

We are particularly interested in how the concept of unbuilding might help to interrogate the urgent challenges of remaking worlds in the face of ecological and material degradation. The contributions highlight the possibilities that inhere in unbuilding as a response to the failed designs, contaminated environments, infrastructural afterlives, and material legacies that compound ecologically precarious futures. We aim to conceptualize how, beyond demolishing, repairing, or waiting, unbuilding is a form of purposeful world-making in which the intentionality of design is unsettled by the temporalities of unruly materials and practices as they break down, seep, or demand attention.

Unbuilding can take many different forms—from decommissioning to repurposing, recycling to rewilding. Mobilizing unbuilding to think across these diverse processes opens up new interconnections and resonances that extend existing, but often disparate, scholarship. How, for example, can we use unbuilding to explore the potentialities of restoration, repair, and their implications of care (Buser and Boyer 2021), as well as the superficiality of restorative promises that fail to materialize in practice (Lea and Pholeros 2010)? Can it provide new perspectives on decommissioning, such as how obsolete structures become materially and institutionally embedded in relational fields beyond the intentions of their original design (Ringel 2016; van der Hoorn 2009)?

Unbuilding draws together diverse fields, from the socio-material challenges of decaying industrial plants and housing developments that were once markers of supposed recovery, growth, and progress (Lynch 2022, Pelkmans 2013), to acts of retrofitting and repurposing by engineers and skilled bricoleurs (Graham and Thrift 2007, Martinez 2017). It opens up considerations of the environmental hazards of legacy industrial sites (Edensor 2005) drawing attention to the lingering vitality of supposed silver bullet materials such as concrete (Elinoff 2017), asbestos (Gregson, Watkins, and Calestani 2010) and plastics (Shove, Watson, Hand, and Ingram 2007), and how ecological relations are reconfigured in unpredictable ways (Rippa 2021).

This series has developed out of a Wenner Gren-funded intensive workshop that aimed to collaboratively develop a lexicon for analysing and theorising unbuilding; untangling the kinds of relationships, processes, commitments, contingencies and imaginaries that unbuilding entails. We invited participants to propose keywords that evoked different aspects of unbuilding and its associated practices, processes and demands. The essays in this series form part of this lexicon, taking these key terms as a foundation for exploring the diverse possibilities of what unbuilding might offer as concept, method or practice.

In their contribution, Hannah Knox and Itay Noy take up the notion of balance in unbuilding the fossil fueled energy system and attempts to affect a just energy transition. Frequently, the concept of unbuilding often evokes a sense of imbalance—things falling down, out of kilter, and in a state of disarray. However, unbuilding can also be reckoning with things already out of balance, offering a means of returning equilibrium to a situation heading for collapse. Simón Uribe Martinez considers the role of corrosion in unbuilding in the context of state infrastructure projects in Colombia’s Putumayo region. While few materials embody concrete’s promise of modernity, its corrosion represents a latent threat to this promise, if not a symptom of its demise. The essay reflects on the material and political tension between concrete and corrosion, and how this shapes perceptions on the nature and pervasiveness of corruption.

In a high-rise landscape in Ulaanbaatar, Rebekah Plueckhahn examines how curation becomes a mobilizing force for residents of new low-middle income apartment housing. Unfinished aspects of neighborhood infrastructures lead to issues with breakdown, flooding, and dispute that require communal curation, reconfiguration, and reformulation. Her contribution opens up what unbuilding means in circumstances where building was never completed in the first place. Catherine Fennell focuses in on deconstruction as a process of dismantling structures to retrieve components for reuse in late industrial, urban America. Examining scholarly concerns with discards, (re)valuation, and durability, she makes the case for an anthropology of unbuilding focused not on systemic transformation, but self-conscious dwelling with remainders.

Penny Harvey examines preoccupations with immobilization in the British nuclear industry as the first generation of nuclear power stations are dismantled and their heterogeneous, intolerably hazardous wastes must be managed. Immobilization is central to projects for the containment and disposal of radioactive wastes, while the term also draws attention to the unknowability of future environmental rhythms and relations on which the technological promise of disappearance ultimately depends. Alberto Corsín Jiménez develops his contribution to the lexicon through a focus on the intransitive in the pandemic city. All over the world, lockdowns brought cities to a halt. The city as we knew it effectively disappeared during lockdown, and a different city temporarily popped up in its place. He asks, whereas the building of cities has traditionally signaled transitions elsewhere (progress, development, modernity), what did the interregnum of pandemic unbuilding teach us? What forms does the intransitive inchoate?

Evelina Gambino takes movement as her starting point to trace collaborations between human and non-human elements of ecosystems in infrastructural projects in the Republic of Georgia. She explores how migration, protest and civic movements seek to unbuild narratives of state-led development as a way of moving towards a different kind of future in Georgia. For Felix Ringel, Germany’s infamous Urban Regeneration East (Stadtumbau Ost) program and its realignments of capital, labor, infrastructures, and futures, is the terrain for exploring redistribution as a facet of unbuilding. Rather than the violent erasure of remnants from the socialist past, he shows how this large-scale demolition unfolds as a state-led redistribution of people and materials in the wake of German reunification.

In the context of aging high-rise housing in Romania, Maria Şalaru explores retrofitting and its iterative processes of building and unbuilding that aim to enhance energy efficiency and extend a tower block’s lifespan. Undoing past interventions while creating new ones, retrofitting reveals the vulnerabilities of past building practices, shifts infrastructural responsibility onto residents, and unfolds as an uneven, improvisational process. Finally, Constance Smith considers unruliness as a characteristic of unbuilding. In Nairobi, visions of an infrastructure-led, world-class future city are being unbuilt by unruly ecologies and more-than-human assemblages that disrupt the intentionalities and temporalities of city-making and unmake the city from within.

By drawing out different facets of unbuilding, these essays probe the intersections and contradictions between planning for the future and the unruliness of ecological change. Cumulatively, the series draws attention to the connections between material decay, the unstable frameworks of policy over time, unpredictable environmental consequences, the internal momentum of investment decisions and the uneven distribution of those who work to check and/or to challenge that momentum. Collectively, we ask, what can unbuilding do?