The origins of ProBE can be traced back to the theoretical debate on The Production of the Built Environment that took place between 1979 and 1995.
The debate was organised in the form of annual summer schools known as the Bartlett International Summer School (BISS), initially at the Bartlett School of Architecture and Planning/University College of London, with their annual ‘Proceedings’ a documentation of the debates. Its programme was set out as an attempt to develop a form of analysis which could link an examination of the changing conditions under which buildings are produced with questions and issues in urban development.
This debate did not start with the search for a suitable theory, but originated in opposition to either idealistic or consumption-based approaches to understanding the development of the built environment of the 1970s. It was concerned with escaping the physical conception of the built environment that assumes a relation between things rather than between the people making, changing and using things. This assumption has the effect of maintaining a fixed, absolute spatial object – whether this be the site, a building, an area or the city itself – with distinct properties against which analysis is measured. As a result, even when the production process is considered as the basis of urbanisation, this is always conceived in terms of the physical site of production, the practical product or the individual confronting – ultimately – nature, rather than in terms of changing social relations or social practices. Our view was that production is itself a social, not a physical, process.
Urban 'renewal' in 1970s Europe
The 1970s was the first decade following the end of post-war reconstruction, a period of urban ‘renewal’ in which many parts of capitalist Europe were witnessing dramatic changes in the industrial structure heightened trade union activity, significant building activity and speculation marked by what appeared to be constant crisis, and the springing up of social movements to counter some of the harmful effects these had for much of the working population. It was also a time when alternative modes of production, socialist and capitalist, co-existed. And many of those involved in the debate had been involved in the student movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The debate set out to understand the history and dynamics of the built environment – its driving forces, from a materialistic point of view – in order to change policy and to combat the direction in which capitalist building development appeared to be heading. It was concerned with overcoming some of the problems involved in confining analysis solely to an examination of the distribution and consumption of built form (processes which in themselves produce no additional values), isolated from the processes of actually producing buildings (which are in themselves value-producing). The debate also aimed to understand the process of change in the built environment, not in neoclassical terms as an automatic and passive response to effective demand, but as the result of qualitative changes in social relations.
Change was not interpreted as the result of design innovation, as the creation of the architect or planner, but of the dynamic inherent in the building production process, which might in turn spark off new design. The dynamic was therefore located not in an ideal world but in the social labour process on the premise that this, after all, creates capital, including the fixed capital of building and infrastructure.
The Bartlett International Summer School debates
Sketching the 16-year history of the annual summer school debates can help us understand how it depended on the political background of the time. In an attempt to integrate various disciplines and professional backgrounds, the annual schools were divided into workshops related to, for instance, building design, urban planning and sociology, construction management and economics, building labour and so on. This was intended to facilitate the participation of scholars and practitioners from various related disciplines from across the world, including the socialist states.
The venues as well as the participants of the schools – initially held in London – became increasingly more international:
- Geneva, Switzerland (1983)
- Venice, Italy (1984)
- Vaulx-en-Velin, France (1985)
- Dessau, German Democratic Republic (1986)
- Dortmund, Federal Republic of Germany (1987)
- Mexico City, Mexico (1988)
- Paris, France (1989)
- Moscow, USSR (1990)
- Sao Paolo, Brazil (1991)
- Brussels, Belgium (1992)
- Roubaix, France (1993)
- Glasgow, UK (1995)
The annual summer schools were a great success throughout the difficult years of the 1980s. They covered a wide range of topics, drew on an ever-wider range of examples from different countries and historical periods, and attracted up to 100 different participants for each school including academics, researchers, practitioners and the social partners. The production of the built environment was seen as encompassing all the social processes concerned with producing the built environment, built products, buildings and infrastructure out of natural resources, while consumption was applied to all the processes involved in consuming these, including the wellbeing of tenants. Between these processes were situated the processes of exchange, distribution and circulation, involving complex webs of relations between developers, builders, and landlords and landowners.
At the core of the discussion was the labour process as the active and subjective agent in the production process and, at the same time, as the process whereby labour is appropriated, subsumed and consumed. Changes in the divisions of labour (in particular building labour), the use and reproduction of skills and migrant labour, conditions and methods of employment, the wage form, working conditions, and the tools and materials of production became topics of hot debate. Our assumptions were that a poor-quality building product inevitably stems from poor conditions for building workers and that built form in itself reflects and expresses divisions of building labour, whether between carpenters and bricklayers or architects, engineers and contractors.
The impact of the debates
The debates, often based on research, developed and deepened understanding of certain aspects of the production of the built environment, but this process at the same time also produced an unintended dynamic. The workshops, instead of consolidating the common focus, increasingly turned into ‘camps’ divided by often fundamental ideological dissent and began undermining the very basis of this debate. Before the BISS came to an end, however, it generated an offspring. In 1993 a small group of regular BISS activists founded the ‘European Institute for Construction Labour Research’ (CLR). This institute, which may be regarded as the successor – or ‘survivor’ – of the BISS on The Production of the Built Environment, is now well established and consists of a worldwide network running into many hundreds, with its main office in Brussels and regional offices in Britain, Denmark and Germany. It publishes a quarterly periodical, CLR- News, and a series of books, CLR-Studies, carries out its own research projects and organises seminars and workshops.
Further reading
Linda Clarke & Jörn Janssen (2008) Forum A historical context for theories underpinning the production of the built environment, Building Research & Information, 36:6, 659-662.