Overview

The Practising Ethics project was 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. KNOW is an ESRC-funded research project strengthening pathways to urban equality, based at the Bartlett’s Development Planning Unit.

As part of the Bartlett Ethics Commission, Dr David Roberts produced a survey of the ethical codes and guidance governing 66 built environment professions. For The Ethics of Research Practice, Professor Jane Rendell and Dr Yael Padan examined the Western-centric bias of ethical values stemming from Enlightenment thinking that privileges the individual over the collective. Common to both projects is an investigation of how universal principles relate to specific processes situated in specific contexts.

practisingethics.org brings together a lexicon of ethical principles, guidelines on negotiating 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. The tool has been used by educators, researchers and practitioners to embed ethics into their work, forming the basis of training in UK and international architecture schools and sector CPD. It has been featured in the RIBA Ethical Practice Guide and The Organiser’s Guide to Architectural Education.

The project has received three awards: a UCL Provost’s Award for Education (2018), a commendation in the Ethics and Sustainability category at the RIBA President’s Awards for Research (2018) and a RIBA President’s Award for Research in the Ethics and Education category (2022).

The Bartlett School of Architecture

  • Professor Jane Rendell, Project Lead, Bartlett Ethics Commission; Co-Investigator, Knowledge in Action for Urban Equality (Ethics of Research Practice work package); co-curator
  • Dr David Roberts, Research Ethics Fellow, Bartlett Ethics Commission; designer, co-curator and guide author

Bartlett contributors

External collaborators

  • Dr Yael Padan, Research Fellow (KNOW), co-curator and Guide author
  • Alejandro Vallejo, Havana School of Architecture, Polytechnic José Antonio Echeverría, Guide author
  • Vikas John, Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Case Study author
  • Priya Singh, Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Case Study author

The project was funded by Knowledge in Action for Urban Equality (GCRF ESRC-funded, £200,000) and the Bartlett Ethics Commission (£10,000). The Bartlett Ethics Commission ran from 2015 to 2022; the KNOW project ran from 2018 to 2022. The Practising Ethics website was produced in 2021.

Main image: Suite of Practising Ethics Guides by David Roberts

Transdisciplinary Projects

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