Manifest dismantling means reassembling what progress has smashed, remembering not just preserving.

Evidence

In this context, it was the historian’s task to turn his back on the imagined course of progress and dig up each record of this impulse from the debris, to make the past live in the present, to literally do it justice. Manifest dismantling is similar. It asks us to remember—in the sense of re-membering, the opposite of dismembering. Recall that the Angel of History, beyond disinterested preservation, seeks “to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed.” To tear up the concrete or take down the freeway is to start to piece a community back together, though it may not (ever) look the same again. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 672

Categorization

• DEFINE: Core to defending Odell: dismantling is a reconstruction (re-membering), an assembly of community.
• ADDENDUM: Pairs with the freeway-removal/freeway-fight discourse in the trees infrastructure essay — dismantling infrastructure as recomposition.