Inventing the Built Environment: Planning, Science, and Control in British Architecture

Why and how was the term ‘built environment’ first introduced? Inventing the Built Environment retrieves the origin of this ubiquitous term. The articulation of the ‘built environment,’ Kei demonstrates, coincided with the redefinition of education, research, and professional practices in architecture and town planning in 1960s Britain.

Concentrating on the half-decade during which the term permeated the architectural and planning professions, this book recalls a time when the ‘built environment’ was conceived as a part of the British government’s effort in national economic planning. Inventing the Built Environment unpacks the proposal for a Research Council for the Built Environment to mobilise architecture and town planning for political economy. How a relatively small group of architects, planners, politicians, and researchers transposed scientific thoughts from biology, economics, and computation into the ‘built environment’ will be considered, too. Kei highlights the assumptions about and classification of the population that were made when inventing the ‘built environment.’ The architectural and biosocial implications of the making and remaking of this architectural-environmental notion, in Britain and beyond, will be revealed through the works of pre-eminent architect-planners including Richard Llewelyn-Davies and William Holford.

At a time when environmental concerns again take the front seat of architectural and planning debates, this book offers, for scholars and students, an alternative lens to reflect on the assumptions and bias that can be embedded in our architectural lexicons.

Juliana Yat Shun Kei is a Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Liverpool. Her works investigate the use and abuse of environmental notions in architecture, with a focus on 20th-century British architecture. This interest is derived from her previous research into the post-modern and preservation turn of British architecture through the career of British South-African architect Theo Crosby. Her upcoming project, building on this current research on the invention of the ‘built environment,’ examines the changes in British architecture and urbanism engendered by the establishment of the Department of the Environment in 1970. Her other research focuses on Hong Kong’s architectural and urban culture. With Daniel M. Cooper, she completed a survey of the disappeared Vietnamese refugee camps in Hong Kong in 2022. She is a co-founder of the Hong Kong Design History Network.