Architectures of extraction and repair: material politics, planetary crisis, and the ethics of making
Leads: Deljana Iossifova and Christoph Lueder
By consolidating extraction and repair within a single thematic frame, this call interrogates architecture’s material and ethical obligations in a world of limits. It challenges the discipline to move beyond narratives of innovation and growth, offering instead a space for critical reflection on (architectural) survival, endurance, and transformation. In doing so, it contributes to broader debates on planetary urbanism, post-growth futures, and the politics of infrastructural life.
Architecture is deeply implicated in both the forces of extraction and the practices of repair. From the territorialisation of resources and labour to the care and maintenance of deteriorating structures, architectural production is entangled in socio-ecological processes that both deplete and sustain. Yet, these interdependencies are rarely addressed together. Architectural discourse often treats extraction and repair as separate domains, one concerned with the frontiers of resource accumulation, the other with post-growth imaginaries of care and endurance. This thematic call seeks to bring these approaches into critical conversation.
What kinds of architectural knowledge and practice emerge when extraction and repair are understood not as opposites – but as relational conditions? How does the architectural lifecycle (materially, economically, and ethically) move between depletion and maintenance, violence and care, abandonment and restoration? How might foregrounding these transitions reshape our understanding of architectural responsibility in the context of climate crisis, economic precarity, and postcolonial dispossession?
By interrogating architecture’s complicities in extractive regimes and its potential as a reparative practice, this thematic call invites contributions that reframe architecture as a site of socio-material negotiation. It seeks scholarship that does not merely document destruction, critique extraction, or advocate for sustainability, but examines the infrastructures, aesthetics, temporalities, and political ecologies that structure how architecture is made, unmade, and remade.
Call for Papers: We welcome contributions that critically examine how extraction and repair are co-constitutive in architectural thought and practice. Submissions may draw from historical, theoretical, or practice-based research and may focus on any geographical or temporal context. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
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The architectures of resource extraction, including mining settlements, logging infrastructures, and fossil fuel urbanisms.
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The material ecologies of architectural production, from mineral sourcing and deforestation to global logistics and construction waste.
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The labour regimes underpinning both architectural making and maintenance, including informal and racialised economies of care and construction.
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Reparative design strategies, including adaptive reuse, salvage practices, and post-extractive material economies.
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The aesthetics and ethics of unfinished, provisional, or continuously evolving structures.
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Theoretical and historical approaches that trace the longue durée of architectural depletion and repair as entangled processes.
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Indigenous, feminist, or decolonial perspectives on architectural repair as resistance to extractive logics.
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Legal, financial, and governance frameworks that enable or inhibit reparative architectural practices.