The future is Asian, not tartan!

25 Oct 2005

In Scotland, where there is land aplenty to build on and forests are increasing in size, only Friends of the Earth and the National Trust suggest that the manufacture of houses means concreting over Snowdonia.

Still, in the real world the problem is not that the Highlands are about to be invaded by neds. It is that throughout the UK, the R&D invested in building output is derisory. British construction, along with French, spends £1 on R&D for every £1,000-worth of output – a shocking level of parsimony. By comparison, America spends £2; Japan, £3; Denmark, £7; the Netherlands, £10, and Finland, £25.

No wonder that Kate Barker, in her famous report on housing supply, found that it would take no fewer than 1,200 years, at current rates of house building, completely to refresh Britain’s housing stock.
To upgrade its accommodation for a new century, what Scotland now needs is to re-examine the case for the mass manufacture of airy, light, high-ceilinged homes. And it needs to look at the home as product not just in terms of one or two-person flats for yuppies, but also in terms of houses for whole families that want gardens and space to park. With the space available in Scotland, such homes can spread out, and still have almost no impact on the wildness or beauty of the countryside

In their injured pride, many Scots architects, like others, will sneer at mass manufacture. They will rush to point a finger at the disaster that befell the high-rise flats of Ronan Point, Newham, East London, on 16 May 1968. Of course, for many years Paul Foot, Private Eye and the Socialist Workers Party used the gas explosion at Ronan Point to highlight all that was wrong with capitalist construction. But, nearly 40 years later, the structurally unsound ‘system-built’ concrete panels used at Ronan Point cannot be made an argument against progress.

New structural design codes were introduced after Ronan Point. Manufacturing technique, in concrete as elsewhere, has moved on. Of course, the construction industry, in Scotland as elsewhere, has had its share of T Dan Smiths, Poulsons and all the rest. Yet corruption and poor safety in building represent strong arguments in favour of houses being made by mainstream manufacturing practice, not against such an arrangement.

It’s worth recording a few salient changes since Ronan Point.
First, because of television programmes such as Changing Rooms, the mass of Scots is more interested in housing design than it ever was. Awareness of design, of course, is not the same as expert understanding. But the better quality product that mass manufacture under roofs promises, compared with the shoddiness that follows from laborious construction in the rain and mud, will be appreciated by many Scots.

Second, we now have a little thing called IT. The internet lets architects collaborate with others, and is a growing force with tablets and laptops on site. Internet protocols and videoconferencing around them will move global links between designers and manufacturers up to a new level. At the same time, radio frequency identification tags promise a future where every component in a manufactured house can be tagged, dated and tracked – good for future upgrades. Above all, IT has made today’s generation of factory robots much more sophisticated than those that captured the popular imagination in the ‘Handbuilt by robots’ Fiat Strada television commercials of 1979.
Last, we have the emergence of China. It is becoming a centre not just for low-cost manufacturing, but for R&D. And right now, if you look at China’s cities and coasts, the problem of homelessness is growing so fast it cannot be long before the Chinese start building homes in their factories. The production volumes alone would be enough to amortise R&D budgets very quickly.

For Glasgow and cities like it the options are various. Sooner or later, the Chinese will supplement their domestic manufacture of homes with exports to the rest of the world. Scotland can then import full homes, import merely sub-assemblies of homes and do the assembly itself, or try to establish its own home-building factories.
Of course, planners – themselves afforded ‘key worker’ status by the ODPM in England from April 2006 onward – will want to quarrel with that idea. In any proposal for mass manufacture, they will see a threat to Scotland’s beloved local stone; the Stalinist homogenisation of architecture – a threat to the individual personality of Scottish homes; and a threat to experiment on the working class.
However, I’d wager than many young Scots, working class or not, would rather have a slightly samey, roomy three or four-bedroom home, made of the most modern materials and brilliantly inexpensive to buy and run, than an oh-so-idiosyncratic monument to dampness.

Of course, many mistakes will no doubt be made as we advance toward mass manufacture. For planners to obstruct imports of Chinese mass housing, however, would be entirely against the tradition of Adam Smith. It would be protectionist. It would condemn more urban Scots to poor housing conditions and the poor health that goes with those conditions.

For a port such as Glasgow, the opportunity to work with China and bring new homes, or parts of them, up the Clyde may come within the next decade. And then with the new dwellings that fan out across Scotland, there is the chance for homeowners either to borrow against their homes, or to be mortgage-free quickly. In each case, homeowners could get access to cash in a way that might do much to improve new firm formation in Scotland.

Will it all happen? Well, to embark on the course I suggest is risky. But it is not as great a risk as to condemn thousands of urban Scots to homes that are cramped, damp or dear. We don’t want, either, a generation of Scots youth to have to stay at home with mum and dad. Moreover, there is an older generation of Scots engineers, displaced from their jobs during the Thatcher years, which would very much value the revival of manufacturing in Scotland that homes as products could bring.

The Scottish Enlightenment set the highest standards for human achievement. A mass-manufactured castle could yet prove to be the Scotsman’s home.

James Woudhuysen
James was a speaker at the Is the Future Tartan? session of the Scottish Design Show.