Geographies of undoing

In this chapter, I argue that there are geographies of undoing as there are geographies of doing (of production and consumption). None of them are equally distributed in space and time. There are periods and places where undoing as a cultural, economic and physical process is particularly intense, to the point that it characterizes entire landscapes, material assemblages and personal and social experiences. I focus here on two of the themes of this book—undoing things and undoing worlds—through the contemporary geographies of undoing at both the global and local scale. I ask which practices and phenomena, anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic, constitute the processes that define them. There are four dimensions that need to be explored: subaltern assemblages, technologies of undoing, the geomorphology and ecology of undoing and the uninhabitable. I look at them through two cases studies, one in Europe and one in Africa, where the inequalities of undoing are not only made obvious, but also the creative and generative potential of disassembling and repurposing.

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