Beyond linear progress: Towards a material-temporal understanding of infrastructural unmaking

The implementation of low-carbon futures requires both the assembling of new technologies, and practices, as well as the ‘unmaking’ of extant high-carbon infrastructures. Here, we bring together geographical, STS, anthropological, and sociological thinking on time to re-conceptualise such processes of unmaking. We argue that a focus on temporalities is especially pertinent to the unmaking of material energy infrastructure, as the emergence of fossil fuel societies has also enabled a particular temporality of the future to take hold; one that is linear, future-oriented, and full of promise. The unmaking of energy infrastructures will likely rub up against this temporal form of thinking that dominates modern life. By drawing on three temporal concepts – ruination, suspension, and lingering – we explore how we can conceptualise the temporal dimensions of unmaking material infrastructures more explicitly, and differently. Through foregrounding the multifaceted interactions between the legacies of the past, the realities of the present, and the possibilities of the future we put forward an understanding of infrastructural unmaking and low-carbon futures that seeks to go beyond the confines of linear progress.