“What happens while you’re busy making (other) plans”: Reflections on the pending status of buildings.

The complex of five high-rise buildings called Hochhausscheiben A-E located at the center of postsocialist Halle-Neustadt has been vacant for more than twenty years, no rehabilitation has been realized nor have they been demolished.

In retrospective, the years of vacancy appear as “pending status” or as “standby mode”. Contrary to what one might think, the “pending status” appears to be neither inactive nor one of endless possibilities. 

The intention of my research is to understand how buildings and connected potentialities of their preservation, transformation and demolition have been made and un-/re-made and how they lead to ongoing rehabilitation projects. Rather than favoring an object-oriented approach asking “what an object is” this work is asking “what it becomes in practice”.

Urban planners as well as scientific analyses often ignore the specific role of buildings in urban development. This work aims to fill this gap by combining insights from urban studies and science and technology studies and empirical research.

It aims to open up for new perspectives on buildings in urban change and for (re-) thinking our ways of treating them through the notion of care in more-than-human worlds.

Le « Trait d’Urbain » est un séminaire proposé par le groupe de recherche en Études urbaines afin de permettre aux chercheuses et chercheurs de présenter leurs travaux en cours.

L'entrée est libre.