From renovation to retrofitting to adaptive reuse, working with existing buildings is a key strategy for the sustainable transformation of the built environment. The presence of these approaches and positions reflects growing recognition that the future of architecture may lie less in development and production, and more in stewardship and the long-term maintenance of what already exists.
Maintenance might be the most concrete form of spatial work. On an everyday basis in domestic and public contexts, maintenance work emphasizes the ongoing care-full acts required to sustain built environments. The word maintenance derives from the Old French maintenir, rooted in the Latin manu tenere, meaning “to hold in the hand,” a definition that points to its grounding in craft, manual skill, and practical labor—the hands-on actions through which the continued existence of things is sustained. Renovation is mainly concerned with recreating preexisting conditions in original form, a clear example of which is heritage preservation, which seeks to restore or even in some cases “revive” a state perceived as lost or diminished, and typically carries normative judgment about what should be repaired, replaced, upgraded, or modernized. In a sense, renovation is often closely tied to questions of cultural and economic value, as well as investment and desire for constant improvement. By contrast, maintenance relates more directly to continuity, care, and establishing structures of support for existing conditions whether it is buildings, systems, infrastructures, or relationships.
The choreography of maintenance—the repetition of gestures, routines, and forms of labor that sustain any space over time—can be understood as both an aesthetic and political practice in its own right. In self-organized contexts, these acts are not merely delegated tasks, but expressions of a collective ethic—an active sharing of responsibility that relieves pressure on a small core team through coordinated common (collective) action. In many renovation processes, especially on abandoned sites, visible and significant interventions are prioritized, while the ongoing labor of care and upkeep is marginalized. Self-organized contexts, by contrast, foreground maintenance as fundamental rather than secondary to architectural practice.
The Atlas of Maintenance Acts (2025–) is an ongoing artistic research project that documents fieldwork within self-organized cultural spaces while investigating the temporal, social, and spatial dimensions of maintenance.1 Bringing attention to the often-overlooked work through which communities create and sustain the conditions for collective life, the atlas reveals three interconnected propositions: maintenance time as a non-linear spatial process, the micro-politics of maintenance acts, and the role of domesticity revealed through the movement of maintenance from hidden domestic labor into the public sphere. Developed as both a form of documentation and a research method, the atlas combines stories, maps, scores, diagrams, and visual traces to generate situated forms of knowledge rather than simply represent them. As an open and evolving online collection, it functions as a practice of commoning, a shared framework for collectively understanding, organizing, and reimagining the maintenance of our built environments.
Maintenance of Independent Cultural Commons
The reuse of unwanted architecture, and the maintenance labor sustaining it, has long constituted forms of spatial labor. Yet these practices remain largely absent from dominant architectural historiographies and are rarely acknowledged in discussions on renovation and reuse. Far from being a recent phenomenon, the adaptation of neglected heritage sites has historically served as a strategy of social, cultural, and political resistance and transformation. However, sites such as factories, schools, hospitals, train stations, market halls do not become “empty” spontaneously. Their abandonment is often the result of complex and difficult histories—of extraction, labor relocation, deindustrialization, change of political regimes, or war. Emptiness, in this sense, is produced ideologically.2 Self-organized renovation efforts in the context of postindustrial landscapes are therefore not simply a strategy to revive dormant spaces. They intervene in the layered sociopolitical conditions shaped by shifting regimes of value within urban development. Here, cultural work plays as specific role: to maintain conditions for the commons.
Founded in Belgium in 1983, Trans Europe Halles (TEH) is a network of independent cultural centers that emerged from collective efforts to reclaim abandoned buildings for cultural use across Europe. What began as a small group of six venues across Europe has grown into a network spanning more than forty countries, with over 150 members. Within this wide geographical range, independent cultural centers operate within diverse socioeconomic and historico-political contexts that shape which types of heritage become vacant and how processes of abandonment unfold in different locations. TEH fosters a shared commitment to the appropriation and careful reuse of architecture by creating spaces for critical thinking and independent culture, and developing new approaches to ecological principles, ethical urban transformation, and the commons. Often this is done within urban environments increasingly shaped by processes that render such spaces marginal, precarious, or uninhabitable.
These initiatives reclaim and adapt a wide range of overlooked or abandoned sites, including disused railway areas, as in Stanica (Žilina, Slovakia) and Institut for (X) (Aarhus, Denmark); former rural factories, as in Not Quite (Fengersfors, Sweden) and Ifö Center (Brömolla, Sweden); abandoned hospitals, as in Konstepidemin (Gothenburg, Sweden); and former military barracks, as in Basis Vinschgau Venosta (Silandro/Schröreds, Italy). Through acts of repair, adaptation, and collective use of resources, these spaces have become enduring cultural infrastructures.
The first time I attended a TEH meeting was in 2012. It took place in Košice, a town in eastern Slovakia, and was hosted by cultural center Tabačka. Hundreds of people working in the independent cultural sector across Europe gathered. Over the years, I have participated in numerous meetings and workshops and visited many TEH member centers.3 As an architect by training, I initially expected to find the scene somewhat unfamiliar to my own professional work. The spontaneous and experimental ways in which independent culture functions seemed quite different from the discussions typically held within urban planning. However, many of the same issues soon emerged: building permits, negotiations, consultations, and project management were all common topics. The conversations that take place during TEH network meetings are often far removed from discussions about upcoming exhibitions or public programs. Instead, they tend to focus on the material conditions of cultural spaces: Have you managed to repair your roof? Were you able to secure ownership of, or access to, your building? Have you found the resources to create accessible facilities, such as bathrooms? Are the pipes still leaking? Is electricity working?4
Acts of repair and maintenance within postindustrial landscapes reveal how cultural spaces are continually produced through everyday care and collective effort. They also point to a shared challenge: sustaining the physical conditions necessary for cultural work in contexts where public institutions and municipal planning fail to adequately support collective spaces. Maintenance thus is not only the ongoing process and labor of caring for infrastructure, but also a set of concrete actions: building, repairing, scouting and securing materials and resources, arranging transport, making millions of phone calls, creating DIY guides, etc. Understanding concrete acts of maintenance repositions cultural work beyond its instrumentalization as a tool of urban regeneration, foregrounding instead its entanglement with architectural labor and the ongoing work of sustaining space.
Ruderal Gardens and Unfinished Architecture
Both in the context of TEH and outside of it, many spaces of self-organized culture become pedagogical sites, where skills and tools for reuse and for non-extractive approaches to architecture are developed through informal education. For example, Rebuilding-to-Last was a project in collaboration with twelve partner organizations, co-funded by the European Union’s Creative Europe program aimed at activating sustainable building solutions and land use within independent cultural centers. It involved several partner cultural centers recognized as leaders in sustainability and alternative technology within the TEH network, including ufaFabrik, an urban eco-village in Tempelhof, Berlin that has occupied a former film factory since the 1970s; Nova Cvernovka, a large-scale cultural center in Bratislava housed in a former chemical school and its dormitories; and Kaapeli, a municipality-supported cultural hub operating from the old Nokia cable factory in Helsinki since the 1990s.
Participatory interventions took place at three selected cultural centres—Stanica in Slovakia, Institut for (X) in Denmark, and Communitism in Greece—which received funding, expert mentorship, and training to further develop their projects through participatory interventions, building transformations, and public community events. As an interdisciplinary group of artists, designers, architects, cultural workers, gardeners, and thinkers from across Europe, we gathered to exchange ideas and develop DIY solutions for sustainable land use by creating ruderal garden environments within former industrial railway zones, demonstrating how neglected land can be transformed through collective care and ecological reuse. These interventions provided a basis for further tracing the acts of maintenance through the atlas.5
From the renovation of factory buildings and the takeover of vacant gardens to the construction of compost stations, these initiatives rely on DIY practices that make use of recycled materials and existing resources. They also extend to the building of new structures—installations, temporary theaters, and gathering spaces—and to hosting events in dusty, unfinished, or ruined environments. Together, these practices reveal the fact that architecture does not need to be finished or polished in order to be used. Its real value lies not in financial terms, but in its sociocultural capacity. It gets shaped through actively practicing the “right to the city” as a collective form of everyday use and realized through collective use.6 This use, in turn, is often made possible and sustained by the ongoing maintenance efforts of community groups.
Acts of Maintenance
Maintenance is an assemblage of tools, labor, actions, connections, intentions, ideas. The Atlas of Maintenance Acts is a part of the online platform Matters of Maintenance, an ongoing artistic research project that investigates the sociomaterial assemblages embedded in practices of maintenance.7 Situated within contemporary debates spanning demolition and the value of interstitial urban sites, as well as ecological and posthumanist approaches to participatory community work, the project foregrounds collective forms of organization and degrowth-oriented thinking within architectural practice. It reframes maintenance in architectural work as a generative and collective mode of spatial engagement, informed by post-extractivist ethics and degrowth-oriented practices. It aims to establish an open-access dissemination platform that raises awareness of non-extractive approaches to architecture and organization by documenting the efforts and cataloging the diverse practices required to rethink architecture as a set of conditions that enable collective life. In doing so, it foregrounds how these conditions must be collectively recognized, articulated, and sustained, particularly within postproductivist and postcapitalist contexts. Learning from and with self-organized cultural spaces, the atlas becomes a form of knowledge and an interactive toolbox of how architecture is practiced and sustained beyond professional and institutional frameworks.
Rather than simply representing geographical data or concrete spatial conditions, the atlas operates as a way of thinking through mapping itself. Mapping is a fundamental architectural tool and a mode of practice that allows us to understand environments, spatial contexts, and the layered relations embedded within landscapes. It provides not only descriptive information but also a basis for constructing imaginative and speculative understandings of space. The atlas is thus a collection of drawings, scores, and games, offering tools for working through speculative methods to understand, organize, and generate propositions within participatory processes as a living organism. Diagrams, in particular, function as ways of making connections visible: they allow systems, relationships, and networks within a given process to be articulated and understood. In doing so, they produce forms of knowledge that are not only analytical but also transferable, capable of being reapplied across different contexts and situations.
Maintenance work through the eyes of architectural practice is often rendered as a post-occupancy concern with little relevance to architectural production.8 Building on Maria Puig de La Bellacasa’s, concept of the “matters of care,” proposed to foreground the affective, ethical, and relational dimensions of sustaining life and environments,9 “matters of maintenance” brings into focus the often-invisible, ongoing material and infrastructural acts that underpin collective existence. Reframing maintenance as a critical site of inquiry not only broadens the analytical scope of care-oriented studies, but also repositions maintenance as a central sociomaterial practice through which the durability, adaptability, and shared use of spaces are negotiated and enacted. Long stretches of maintenance time then become a practical application of care politics.10
Within self-organized cultural organizations, maintenance is not an optional or outsourced service but a necessity, often due to limited financial and organizational resources. Organizing a program, hosting an event, or facilitating participation is inseparable from sustaining the physical space in which these activities take place. Cultural work, therefore, is not only about producing content but also about maintaining the material and social conditions that make collective cultural life possible. In the context of cultural spaces, many practitioners, often the ones in managing positions, adopt roles such as janitor, concierge, or caretaker, emphasizing responsibility over authorship and collective stewardship over individual recognition. In doing so, they reframe maintenance not as a secondary or invisible task, but as a shared, political act that enables the existence and persistence of common spaces. In the context of abandoned buildings, this becomes a form of architectural work.
In architectural practice, time is often conceived as linear and project-based, unfolding through a sequence of distinct stages: initiation, concept development, testing, prototyping, planning, permitting, construction, occupation, and completion. Within this framework, renovation and maintenance frequently appear as an aftermath, a problem to be dealt with later, and better by someone else. One of the key propositions emerging from the atlas is the concept of “maintenance time,” which emphasizes continuity, attentiveness, and the ongoing relational work required to sustain environments and communities. As an alternative temporal logic to the linear sequences that typically structure construction processes, maintenance time proposes a speculative framework for reimagining architectural practice through cyclical rhythms of repair, adaptation, and care-full work. It shifts the focus from building as a singular event and as a static object to architecture as an enduring process of maintenance and collective stewardship.
Maintenance is often assumed to be the responsibility of public administration or relegated to what is perceived as low-status, invisible labor carried out in the background of architectural and urban production. This form of work has historically been disconnected from ideas of both productivity and creative work, often undervalued, hidden, and gendered.11 However, when viewed through the lens of micro-politics, maintenance reveals itself as a distributed field of small, everyday actions that care for the built environment and a counterpoint to dominant forms of public management. These practices produce not only visible impacts on public and domestic space, but also generate forms of collective organization and participation in the production of space itself.
Cleaning floors, moving furniture, stacking wood—acts historically associated with domestic labor and often rendered invisible become recurring gestures of cultural work that redefine the boundaries of architectural practice. By exposing repetitive and often undervalued forms of labor, these practices challenge architectural values centered on authorship, spectacle, efficiency, and growth. The discomfort produced by these acts lies precisely in the encounter between the private and the public: the hidden infrastructures of care and upkeep, usually black-boxed and delegated out of sight, become visible and demand recognition.
Whether performed in domestic or public settings, maintenance is a spatial practice that reveals the relationships between people and their environments. It foregrounds care, adaptation, and long-term stewardship as alternatives to constant reinvention, offering a counterpoint to exploitation-driven approaches in architecture and urban development.
Atlas of Maintenance Acts was initiated in 2025 as a part of my doctoral research.
Maroš Krivy, “Space Half Empty,” Canadian Centre for Architecture, April 2, 2024, ➝.
In recent years, these engagements have become the primary field site for my ongoing artistic research PhD project.
These questions also establish a different kind of foundation for the network, one rooted in organizing approaches towards collective responsibility for maintaining infrastructures—and more recently, lobbying for the sustainable approaches to urban development. This became apparent through collaboration with the universities and research institutions and organizing public programs.
I took part in all three participatory interventions as a part of the transdisciplinary team, and the reflections from this experience became a valuable input for further work with the atlas.
The “right to the city” is a concept proposed by French philosopher Henri Lefebvre which challenges the notions of the city as a commodity and argues for the collective use of space. It suggests the right to the city as a proposition that all inhabitants should have the ability not only to access urban resources and spaces, but also to participate in shaping, producing, and transforming the city.
Matters of Maintenance is both a curatorial platform and an atlas of maintenance acts. Still a work in progress, the atlas can be found here: ➝.
As Hilary Sample has observed in Maintenance Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016).
Maria Puig de La Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
Joan Tronto, “Democratic Care Politics in an Age of Limits,” in Global Variations in the Political and Social Economy of Care, ed. Shahra Razavi and Silke Staab (New York: Routledge, 2012), 29–40.
As scholars and practitioners such as Mierle Laderman Ukeles have shown through declarations of “maintenance art.”