Building with a heart

The construction industry engages to improve social performance You’d hardly believe it was the same place if you visited Fairfield now. A Perthshire council estate in deep decline in the 1980s, it was turned around when a community project trained up local unemployed people to help build and maintain the place [GF22, p29]. Most of it is now owned by a local housing co-operative, which has even invested in techniques designed to reduce asthma triggers and allergens. There are no more boarded up houses, but a waiting list of people wanting to move in. Then there’s prize-winning Peckham Library, a striking piece of architecture creating light and airy public space and functioning as a ‘social hub’ for one of the most high-density populations in the country. Projects like these emphasise the social dimension of the construction sector - and Engage, a new industry network, is building on their example to show that successful buildings are about so much more than just bricks and mortar. The Engage initiative, a partnership including Forum for the Future, CIRIA and the Sustainable Development Corporation, is pushing to get clients, contractors and designers to think about the footprint that they’re leaving on society. “The construction industry has spent a lot of effort improving its environmental footprint. It’s now time to tackle the social side too,” says Forum’s Florian Sommer. The Engage web navigator (www.engageweb.org) has oodles of case studies to whet the appetite, illustrating how factoring in responsible procurement, local labour use and health and safety standards from the start is not just fluffy philanthropy but a way of making the whole process much less of a headache. The website’s profiles of the tools available for measuring social performance mean it’s a good place to start if you want practical guidance on integrating social responsibility into a project. Beyond the e-solution, the network provides training and awareness raising workshops and mentoring services to help those in the industry tackle the problem together. - Hannah Bullock

27 January 2005

Hannah Bullock