Why is construction so backward

Be the first. Add a review and share your thoughts with other readers. Tags Add tags for "Why is construction so backward? Construction industry -- Technological innovations -- Management. Construction -- Industrie -- Gestion. Construction -- Industrie -- Innovations -- Gestion. User lists with this item 1 T Smart Architecture 50 items by sta-ddi updated All rights reserved. Please sign in to WorldCat Don't have an account? Remember me on this computer. Cancel Forgot your password? James Woudhuysen ; Ian Abley.

Print book : English View all editions and formats. It is felt that the building industry lags behind in terms of innovation despite being one of the most significant industries in the world.

Construction industry -- Management. View all subjects. For him, people have despaired of British cities and are flooding out of them. In the process, they use the countryside up with wasteful, low-density settlements by Barratt or worse. What government must do is get people back into cities:. But it is wrong to use green areas until all the usable brownfield land — of which there is plenty in nearby Birmingham — is built on. A massive opportunity to transform the empty quarters of our second city is being overlooked.

To check the alleged flight to the countryside, Rogers wants to impose Value Added Tax on greenfield housing developments 4. Yet the evidence for an urban exodus is mixed. For most cities, the departures have been pretty negligible. So we are not overrunning the land, as Rogers imagines. The long-term prospect for house prices looks grim. No doubt the internet bank Egg has its own reasons for wanting young people to save more for their first house.

What Frederick Engels described as The Housing Question has now become so troublesome that Gordon Brown himself has commissioned a report into it.

Far from concreting over vast expanses of undeveloped land, that many homes will take up just 1. Much, too, suggests that fault lies with weak production volumes and weak innovation on the part of its building industry. There is a shortage, not of land for building on, but of homes that people want to live in.

Yet more than burgeoning demand and faltering supply lie at the root of extortionate prices for new homes, old houses and the repair and refurbishment of old houses.

Investment in normal capitalist companies has not been very attractive since the millennium; so UK financial institutions have preferred to go fleecing consumers on the mortgage market.

Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott's target of just homes to be made through prefabrication shows how building remains a 19th century affair, not a 21st century one. Drawing on the latest technologies that have emerged both inside and outside the sector, Why is construction so backward? It is a powerful call for reform, and a sharp polemic against architecture as social engineering and environmentalist dogma.

Contains a foreword by Martin Pawley Includes contributions from such high profile figures as Stefan Muthesius and Miles Glendinning Praise for Why is construction so backward? Reflecting effortlessly across the literature of property, business, market research and construction, the book's kaleidoscope of ideas, examples and images gives it a refreshing depth of insight and breadth of vision. This timely work forces one to think about construction in the broadest terms. Required reading.

The book is persuasive, at times heavily prescriptive, and certainly argumentative - but it may catalyse a wider and more informed debate on the future of UK housing policy. Get A Copy. More Details Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. Lists with This Book. Metadata Show attachments and full item record. Description Construction boasts a vast worldwide literature, but few books take an international overview or draw on relevant technologies outside construction.

This book fills those gaps, concentrating on the UK but also investigating international practice. My book engaged in contemporary debates in the field and since publication, the Government has decided to build three million new homes by