Repair through unbuilding: Ethnographic insights into material reuse and cleaning practices

EASST2026, ‘More Than Now: Exploring Resilient Futures’, European Association for the Study of Science and Technology, AGH University of Kraków, 08–11 September 2026

In this conference presentation I argued that an ethnographic account of reusing building parts renders visible how practices of repair and ‘unbuilding’ blur the lines between construction and demolition. While repair foregrounds practices of maintaining and preserving materiality, unbuilding draws attention to the processes through which buildings are pulled apart and their material relations transformed. Drawing on ethnographic research of a socialist high-rise in eastern Germany under deconstruction, I explored how these processes involve a lengthy negotiation of the building’s materiality and its uses.

I argued that asbestos removal can be understood as a form of cleaning and thus of repair (Edensor; Graham and Thrift). In particular, I focused on the cleaning of asbestos from materials intended for reuse in a new building, which transforms the older building into a site of material investigation, separation, and negotiation (Lynch; Siscarenco). Material investigation involved both formalized and embodied sensory expertise, through which the building became known as a specific material composition. In this way, asbestos was a productive and preliminary means of knowing, managing, and normatively ordering built materials: determining what could be separated, reused, or removed. In this process, reuse-materials and contaminated materials from deconstruction became entangled, showing how practices of cleaning produce different forms of material order and renegotiate the relationship between a building’s past materiality and its future.

More information
https://nomadit.co.uk/conference/easst2026/paper/100584