Barbour ABI Blog

Introducing ‘Recreative Construction’ from Brian Green

by Tom Hall

“Recreative Construction” is a new, exclusive and free-to-access series of articles written by experienced construction industry commentator Brian Green for Barbour ABI and supported by the Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB). Recreative Construction will be examining the challenges facing the construction community and diving into how you can work towards building a better future for the construction industry and Britain as a whole.

Developing A Better Britain

With the Covid-19 pandemic causing a major shift in the way the construction industry is operated and making us challenge what ‘business as usual’ actually means, it has sparked a passion for improvement within the industry which may be exactly what we needed.

The construction industry has a major role to play in the development of a better Britain. With the answer not simply relying on technical fixes, we need to start thinking about people and communities, and how they are at the centre of our future plans. Ultimately, we need a long-term vision. By setting out some of the difficult choices the wider industry has to make in the coming months, the decisions made will not only influence the next decade, but lay the foundations for generations to come.

Three Major Forces

Throughout the series Brian will be examining what he regards as the three major forces that are shaping the build environment over the next 20 years, and how the combination of these forces and the urgency with which they need to be met heralds a remarkable period of change. Failing to account for all three forces and how they interact will produce partial answers and unstable solutions at best.

  • Digital Technologies
  • Climate Change
  • Demographic Shifts

It will take unprecedented amounts of construction work to appropriately reconfigure the UK’s buildings and infrastructure to accommodate for these factors, with the next couple of decades testing the construction sector immensely. Meeting the challenges presented was always going to be a considerable task, notwithstanding the current global pandemic. If the industry is to progress, there is a lot of scope for improvement, not solely in the industry’s technical capabilities and its resources but also within its culture.

Expanding Knowledge

Whilst it won’t be easy, the construction industry needs to begin expanding their ideologies, coming increasingly outside of it’s normal spheres of knowledge. Understanding better how people use buildings, will ultimately result in buildings being built for the people. We need to expand our knowledge base beyond what we already know towards a wider more integrated approach that fits everyone. By having a vision of what to expect in the coming months and years, we can prepare, adapt and change in order to successfully work towards collective future for the construction industry.

By drawing threads together, outlining the issues and suggesting a set of principles that will lead to the best possible outcomes, our Recreative Construction series aims to inform you of the necessary steps needed to propel the construction industry forward into the future and deliver not only the right build environment for ourselves. but for our children too.

Click here to register for our Recreative Construction articles as and when they are released.

About the author

Picture of Tom Hall

Tom Hall

Chief Economist at Barbour ABI & AMA Research

Tom is Chief Economist at Barbour ABI and AMA Research, providing analysis and economic insight for construction and its related sectors. Tom has over a decade of experience in a variety of strategic and economic roles and joined the team in early 2019.

Offering bespoke research and tailored analysis to our clients, Tom also speaks at industry events and works closely with journalists and other industry bodies to provide commentary on the built environment.

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