Ecologies of production, and the production of ecologies

This issue of arq addresses the emerging field of Production Studies in architecture.That field has developed through a UK/Brazil research project titled TF/TK (Translating Ferro/ Transforming Knowledges of Architecture, Design and Labour).Production Studies is concerned with the processes, relations, and conditions through which the built environment is produced, emphasising political economy, and material and social dimensions of making that are typically overlooked in mainstream accounts of design.TF/TK draws from the work of architect and historian Srgio Ferro who -as the curators of this issue, Jon Goodbun and Liam Ross, explain -'reimagined the building site not merely as a place of construction, but as a site of radical political and social possibility.''Ferro posits the construction site as both a primary site of conflict and labour exploitation', they write, 'but also as a potential space for organising construction workers through experiments in free, self-managed and unalienated labour and working-class solidarity.'The space and collective life of site, typically disregarded by architects, asserts necessary critiques 'of the contradictory and problematic relation of architectural practice to building labour.'This arq emerges from the Production Studies International Conference, organised by TF/TK and held at Newcastle University, UK, from 25-28 March 2024.Specifically, it emerges from a session co-organised at that event by Goodbun and Ross concerning ecologies of production, and the production of ecologies.As outlined in their introductory 'perspective' (pp.4-10), the session explored how Srgio Ferro's conception of the building site could be extended.Particularly, in the context of our present climate emergency, what might it mean to 'ecologise' the study of building production?Ferro's focus on the building site is thus expanded here to include wider contexts and supply chains transcending the immediate locale of construction.'Just as Ferro envisioned the building site as a space for organising workers, the extended building site invites us to identify and forge new solidarities across global networks of labour and extraction', Goodbun and Ross write.'The extended building site invites us to cycle between the abstract and the concrete, examining specific practices and sites while situating them within broader socioecological systems [], employing an ecology of methodologies able to engage and represent both qualitative and quantitative materials with care and complexity.' Articles collected here thus extend the architectural conception of the building site, confronting the entanglement of labour with various ecological consequences across the full chains of material production.