Practising Ethics

Overview

The Practising Ethics project has been developed through a collaboration between the Bartlett Ethics Commission and ‘The Ethics of Research Practice’, part of Knowledge in Action for Urban Equality (KNOW). The Bartlett Ethics Commission is a Bartlett Faculty-funded project exploring ethical issues facing built environment researchers and professional practitioners, while KNOW is an ESRC-funded research project strengthening pathways to urban equality.

As part of the Bartlett Ethics Commission led by Professor Jane Rendell, Dr David Roberts produced a survey of the ethical codes and guidance governing 66 built environment professions; while, for ‘The Ethics of Research Practice’, Rendell and Dr Yael Padan, examined the western-centric bias of ethical values stemming from enlightenment thinking that privilege the individual over the collective. Common to both projects is an investigation of how the relation between universal principles and specific processes is situated in specific contexts, and the proposition that it is through a practice of ethics that one navigates the universal and the specific principles and processes.

For this reason, practisingethics.org takes the form of open access project for built environment researchers and practitioners bringing together a lexicon of ethical principles, guidelines on how to negotiate ethical issues in practice, reading lists of ethics publications, overviews of ethics protocols, and case studies including reflections on the hotspots, touchstones, keystones, blindspots, moonshots and milestones of ethical processes. Under the title ‘Will I Cause Harm?’ the guidelines won a RIBA Research Award for Education in 2022.