Exploring Roles and Relationships in the Production of the Built Environment

This is a case study of a compact module aiming to develop understanding of the built environment as a socially-produced set of objects, spatial arrangements and relationships. It invites students in their first university year to explore and question the interplay of professions, industries, economic processes and political structures, doing so partly through analysis of professional discourse and partly through collaborative detective work with students and teachers from a variety of streams in the built environment faculty. It is a small course, just one eighth of the work done in the first year, and concludes with a short field trip where the methods developed in London are applied to help understand a foreign city quickly from a great variety of perspectives. The course is partly a response to the many criticisms which have been levelled at the rigidity of professional boundaries in the UK and elsewhere and commands warm support from visiting examiners and professionals and from many of its participants.