Cement – Concrete Steps to Built Environments. A technical Note

This technical note extends inchoative design to cement manufacturing and the built environment. It characterizes the dominant Portland-cement–kiln pathway as a resistive insertion: a centralized, high-temperature regime that compels its milieu, externalizes process by-products, and receives little corrective feedback from environmental harm—thereby entrenching social and material lock-ins often described as “concrete dependence.” In Simondonian terms, the system exhibits low technicity, optimizing convenience and throughput while stressing associated milieus (quarries, energy systems, downwind communities). The note proposes a non-negative Inchoation Index to read cement practices along a continuum from parasitic to symbiotic insertion. It then sketches a multi-pronged redesign: (i) process innovations that cut inherent process emissions (including paste reuse and lower-carbon chemistries such as LC3); (ii) material substitution and clinker reduction; (iii) circular construction that recirculates components and uses concrete only where functionally superior; and (iv) demand-side design that privileges wood, earth-based materials, hempcrete, and hybrids where appropriate. The aim is to de-concretize high-carbon lock-ins and re-concretize built systems as open, adaptive ensembles embedded in their technotopes—so that the “concrete jungle” coexists less antagonistically with the biosphere.