Ethics in the built environment
The Bartlett Ethics Commission seeks to develop a practice of ethics for built environment researchers and practitioners, navigating connections between universal principles and particular processes.
The Bartlett Ethics Commission seeks to develop a practice of ethics for built environment researchers and practitioners, navigating the relationship between universal principles and particular processes. It is led by Professor Jane Rendell, Director of Architectural Research (2004-11) and Vice Dean Research for the Bartlett (2010-13), and Dr David Roberts, Bartlett Ethics Fellow, and brings together specialists from across The Bartlett, UCL and beyond, with collective expertise in action-based, humanities, participatory, practice-led, social science and science methods.
Alongside The Bartlett Ethics Commission, Jane and David have been co-members of the RIBA Ethics and Sustainable Development Commission Consultative Group, and Jane has been Co-Investigator for ‘The Ethics of Research Practice’, part of Knowledge in Action for Urban Equality (KNOW) project (PI Prof Caren Levy), working with Research Associate, Dr Yael Padan.
Together Jane, David and Yael have co-curated an open access educational toolkit, practisingethics.org, including over 30 contributors, which includes 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. A summary of this work is available in The Bartlett Review.
The research has received three awards: A UCL Provost’s Award for Education in 2018; a Commendation in the category of Ethics and Sustainability in the RIBA President’s Awards for Research in 2018; and an RIBA Research Award for Education in 2022 under the title ‘Will I Cause Harm?’.
For specialist ethical advice, please follow links to guidelines and protocols. For more information on related projects, events, papers, publications and initiatives, please see the following sections on this page:
Projects
The Bartlett Ethics Commission encompasses a number of research projects and working groups with the aim to identify specific issues arising in built environment research and develop a Bartlett vision and code to guide the practice of ethics in teaching, research and enterprise in the built environment.
Ethics in Built Environment Research (September 2014 – September 2015)
This research project took the first step in identifying specific issues arising in built environment research.
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Bartlett Ethics Working Group (January 2015 – June 2017)
The core aim of the Working Group was to develop a Bartlett vision and processes to guide the practice of ethics in teaching, research and enterprise in the built environment. This approach to ethics was envisaged to be specific and appropriate to built environment disciplines and related professions, and its processes driven by pedagogic and intellectual concerns, rather than bureaucratic conditions.
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Report of the Bartlett Ethics Working Group Pilot (2016-7)
Through monthly meetings, work started on the UCL Ethics Pilot in September 2016, with the aim of mapping, modelling and testing the implications of the new UCL ethics processes and recommending a new devolved model which is locally-managed, administrated, and resourced.
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Practising Ethics (September 2015-September 2016)
A PhD training project funded by LAHP – led by Professor Jane Rendell, (The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL) in collaboration with Professor Sharon Morris and Dr Hayley Newman, (The Slade School of Fine Art, UCL) and Professor Alan Read (Kings College London).
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Reactivating the Social Condenser (May 2016)
A collaboration between Professor Jane Rendell and Dr Michal Murawski (Paul Mellon Fellow, SSEES) to re-examine and re-charge the social condenser as a vector for radical architectural thought and practice.
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Special issue of the Journal of Architecture
Speech ExtrActions – Testimony, Evidence and Witness in Response to the Mining Industry (June-October 2016)
A collaboration between Professor Jane Rendell and Diana Salazar (DPU, The Bartlett, UCL) to strengthen global partnerships between academics and activists working in mining, the environment and human rights.
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The Bartlett Ethics Commission (September 2015 – September 2020)
A summary of the key activities and outputs of the Commission.
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From 2014 onwards, the Commission has been involved in the hosting of 12 events, from a two-day public international conference to in-house training sessions for postgraduate researchers. They have provided a platform for Bartlett students and staff and wider UCL community to speak alongside key built environment practitioners – academics, anthropologists, architects, artists, community activists, designers, engineers, planners, philosophers, public intellectuals, scientists, urbanists and writers – to collectively discuss practical and conceptual ethical issues and share innovative approaches.
Rich Seams/Dark Pools (January 2014)
A conference exploring the full range of positions on the subject of fossil fuel funding and research, and to better understand the different aims, motivations and issues at stake. It addressed such topics as influence, impact and engagement; the possibilities offered by arm’s length funding; the need to engage with corporations; the ethics and governance of donations and sponsorship; and the relation between academia and activism/campaigning.
Ethics in Built Environment Research: Bartlett Research Exchange (October 2014)
A symposium asking what particular challenges we face as built environment professionals and researchers to practice ethically today. It addressed key themes of sustainability, quality, participation, the Global South, and the co-production of knowledge in urban regeneration schemes.
Ethics in Built Environment Research: PhD Symposium (March 2015)
A day of presentations and discussions of ethical issues – practical and conceptual – encountered by PhD students from across The Bartlett.
Divestment Debate: This house would divest from fossil fuels (24 March 2015)
A debate between UCL academics on whether the university should divest from fossil fuels and sell its £21million invested in the industry.
Reactivating the Social Condenser: Architecture against Privation (18 May 2015)
A conference to re-examine and re-charge the social condenser as a vector for radical architectural thought and practice.
Practising Ethics in Built Environment Research: International Two-Day Conference (June 2015)
A transdisciplinary symposium to explore the role ethics plays in built environment research – tackling topics such as big data, fossil fuel, housing and regeneration, and addressing issues like confidentiality, consent, risk and vulnerability.
Media coverage
- AJ: RIBA and ARB ethical codes attacked
- AJ: What are architects responsible for
- Blog: Some ethical challenges in the built environment
Conference recordings
Practising Ethics: Positionality, Spatiality and Subjectivity in Dialogue: Symposium (October 2015)
A symposium to consider how ethics is practiced from the perspective of positionality, spatiality and subjectivity in dialogue. Drawing on their own experiences as students, supervisors, practitioners and researchers, speakers explored questions around the spatial positions we take up when speaking and listening, how these are informed by the psychic structures of subject-object relations and the power dynamics around seeing/being seen, speaking/being heard, and variations according to practice and discipline.
Speech ExtrActions – Testimony, Evidence and Witness in Response to the Mining Industry: One Day Symposium (October 2016)
A voicing of displacements, dispossessions and environmental disasters that have occurred in responses to the activities of the extractive industries. The presentations and discussions were considered in terms of issues of evidence, witnessing, and testimony connected with human rights and environmental justice. Speakers came from communities in Colombia, Brazil and Indonesia, legal associations, NGOs, and universities.
Judgement Calls: One Day Symposium (13 June 2017)
A one-day PhD workshop focusing on ethical dilemmas in art and architectural research and practice.
Creative Resistance: Architecture, Art, Writing, a Life…: One Day Symposium (4 July 2017)
A workshop exploring and performing the role of critical and creative writing in research. It asked how can experimental approaches to writing in architecture and open up spaces for resistance, dissidence, liberation?
Book launch of Emma Cheatle, Part-Architecture: The Maison de Verre, Duchamp, Domesticity and Desire in 1930s Paris (4 July 2017)
A book launch featuring a presentation by Emma Cheatle (Newcastle University) followed by responses from Hélène Frichot (KTH, Stockholm) and Barbara Penner (Bartlett), and an open Q&A chaired by Jane Rendell.
A presentation and discussion to explore ways in which a creative re-imagining of the possible – in the midst of material, situated actualities – offers potent forms of ethics-in-action. The presentation was structured through six vignettes about how and why the methods of creative practice research offer a potent crucible for the cultivation of ethical know-how in ways far more potent than the processes of institutional ethics approval.
Bartlett Research Conversations: The Age of Wildfire (28 January 2020)
The wildfires currently burning across the planet are one of many indicators that we are now in a moment of crisis. Funded by The Bartlett Ethics Commission, hosted as part of The Bartlett School of Architecture, PhD Research Conversations, and chaired by Professor Jane Rendell, Professor Lesley Lokko and Professor Kathryn Yusoff explore how interdisciplinary research across cultures can create a new opportunity to re-think epistemological boundaries and categories at a time when the decolonisation of canon seems both inevitable and prescient. They consider how lives and life-forms – historic, contemporary and future – occupy different positions of cause and effect, agency and possibility.
Reports
As Bartlett Ethics Fellow, David has produced three new reports: the first maps ethical issues associated with research conduct; the second sets out the Bartlett’s specialist research on ethics; and the third explores the codes of ethics used by over 60 UK and international built environment professional bodies.
A survey collating and annotating papers, policies, procedures, governance structures and related resources on research ethics, integrity, funding and sponsorship at the Bartlett, UCL, other universities, professional bodies and specialist literature.
Mapping ethics at the Bartlett report by Dr David RobertsA report mapping and connecting ethical approaches, expertise and issues at undergraduate, postgraduate and staff levels across the schools and units that comprise the Bartlett. It is based on 28 semi-structured interviews with staff across the faculty, 17 of which were conducted by Charlotte Johnson in 2014/15 and 11 by David Roberts in 2015/16.
The report is structured in three sections. The first summarises key findings and offers recommendations. The second sets out the organisational principles, structures, procedures, research, teaching and expertise related to ethics at all levels within each school. The third collates the range of common ethical issues raised across the faculty thematically.
The report is linked to an online appendix of ethics resources from across the Bartlett – publications, lectures, reading lists and samples of ethics applications.
Built environment professional bodies codes review by Dr David RobertsA review surveying the ethical dimensions of codes of conduct and practical guidance resources from 55 UK built environment professional bodies. Their commonalities and divergences are analysed against the ethical principles and support from a further 11 international and independent organisations. It brings together construction, design, energy, engineering, heritage, planning, project management, surveying, sustainability and transport bodies but its constructive critique is principally oriented to UK architecture professions. Interim findings and recommendations were shared with the RIBA in August 2017 and the full report shared with the RIBA and ARB in January 2018.
The report is structured in five sections. The first section sets out key findings and recommendations related to principles, guidance and access. The following three sections unpack each of these subjects in more detail, quoting from emerging professionals, independent organisations and specialist literature to give context to the way these issues are addressed by an array of UK and international professional bodies. The final section provides comprehensive links to the 66 codes and 51 guidance resources, brought together for the first time.
While each of these professional bodies has its own shortcomings and omissions, by reading across them we can establish an overview of the potential for professional bodies to set ethical standards and provide ethical guidance.
The conceptual and practical context of the Commission’s research has derived from the work by Jane developing ethics as a form of critical spatial practice through her investigation into UCL’s decision to accept funding from the charitable arm of BHP Billiton and her pro bono work into the regeneration of the Aylesbury Estate in Southwark.
Alongside this, David’s research and practice addresses the unethical dispossession of social housing in London by exploring the regeneration of the Haggerston Estate in Hackney and privatisation of Balfron Tower in Poplar, and his survey of the ethical codes and guidance governing 66 built environment professions.
While Yael has been examining the western-centric bias of ethical values stemming from enlightenment thinking that privilege the individual over the collective. Common to this research 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 universal principles through specific processes.
A co-edited/authored book is currently in development.
Jane Rendell, Expert Witness Statement for Aylesbury Leaseholders Public Inquiry in the use of Compulsory Purchase Orders on phase 1b/c of the ‘regeneration’ of the Aylesbury (January/April 2018)
Jane Rendell, Rebuttal Statement for Aylesbury Leaseholders Public Inquiry in the use of Compulsory Purchase Orders on phase 1b/c of the ‘regeneration’ of the Aylesbury (January/April 2018)
Jane Rendell, ‘From, In and With Anne Tallentire’, special issue of Field: Becoming A Feminist Architect (2017)
David Roberts, ‘Make Public: Performing Public Housing in Ernö Goldfinger’s Balfron Tower’, Journal of Architecture (2017).
Jane Rendell, ‘Arry’s Bar’, in Michal Murawski and Jane Rendell (eds) Reactivating the Social Condenser, special issue of the Journal of Architecture (2017)
Jane Rendell, ‘The Social Condenser: A Thing in Itself?’, in Michal Murawski and Jane Rendell (eds) Reactivating the Social Condenser, special issue of the Journal of Architecture (2017)
David Roberts, ‘Three Demands', RIBA Journal (2016)
Jane Rendell and David Roberts, ‘Ethical Encounters’, The Bartlett Review (2016)
David Roberts ‘A Building Archive’, in Beebeejaun Y. (ed) The Participatory City (2016)
Jane Rendell, ‘Giving An Account Of Oneself, Architecturally’, Special Issue of the Journal of Visual Culture (2016)
Media coverage
Interview with Alice Bell, as part of her ‘Five challenges for universities working with the fossil fuel industry’
Jane Rendell, ‘Critical Spatial Practice as Parrhesia’, special issue of MaHKUscript, Journal of Fine Art Research (2016)
Media coverage
David Roberts, Report in objection to Balfron Tower refurbishment proposal PA/15/02554 (2015)
Further information
You can read more about UCL's policies and The Bartlett Faculty’s principles of creativity, integrity, equity and autonomy in the development of a sustainable, diverse world.
Please visit iDARE to see how research led by the University of Melbourne is investigating new ways of supporting ethical know-how and creative practice research for higher degree research candidates, supervisors, academics and ethics administrators.
The Bartlett faculty principles are:
- equity
- autonomy
- integrity
- sustainability
Read more about UCL's policies on ethics in the university's general code of ethical principles.
People
Director of the Bartlett Ethics Commission
Professor Jane Rendell
Jane Rendell’s work crosses architecture, art, feminism, history and psychoanalysis. She has introduced concepts of ‘critical spatial practice’ and ‘site-writing’ through authored books like The Architecture of Psychoanalysis (2016), Site-Writing (2010), Art and Architecture (2006), and The Pursuit of Pleasure (2002); and co-edited collections Critical Architecture (2007), Spatial Imagination (2005), The Unknown City (2001), Intersections (2000), Gender, Space, Architecture (1999) and Strangely Familiar (1995).
New publications include, ‘Giving an Account of Oneself, Architecturally’, Journal of Visual Culture; Silver (2017) for Lost Rocks by Justy Phillips & Margaret Woodward; and with Michal Murawski, Reactivating the Social Condenser, co-edited special issue of The Journal of Architecture forthcoming 2017). Jane is Professor of Architecture and Art at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, where she is Director of History & Theory.
Her writing practice, research and teaching are closely related: Jane initiated and teaches on the new MA Situated Practice, as well as the MA Architectural History. She also supervises practice-led PhDs in urbanism, art, architecture and experimental writing. She leads the Bartlett’s Ethics Commission, working with Dr David Roberts, Bartlett Ethics Fellow. And, working with Research Associate Dr Yael Padan, she is leading the Ethics Work Package (WP3) for KNOW.
Jane was invited to deliver keynotes internationally for conferences on ethics in creative practice, for iDARE at the University of Melbourne (2017), and on architecture at Yale (2018). She also delivered keynotes on ethics in art and design practice conference, University of the Arts London (2018) and for the Annual Art and Design Education Conference at Goldsmiths (2019).
Along with David Roberts, Jane has been invited to become a member of the steering group for the RIBA Ethics Commission.
She was awarded a History/Theory prize at the RIBA Research Awards 2018 for her work on housing, psychoanalysis and ethics. She also received the Provost’s Education Award in 2018 for her work on ethics.
janerendell.co.uk
Jane Rendell's CV
Bartlett Ethics Fellow
Dr David Roberts
David Roberts is a Teaching Fellow in Design and History & Theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture and Visiting Professor at Aarhus School of Architecture. He is Research Ethics Fellow at the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment, led by Professor Jane Rendell. Alongside his teaching and research, he is part of collaborative art practice Fugitive Images and of architecture collective Involve.
David’s collaborative research, art and cultural activist practice engages community groups whose homes and livelihoods are under threat from urban policy, and extends architectural education to primary and secondary school children. Through this collaborative practice he co-wrote and co-produced the feature-length documentary/fiction film Estate, a Reverie; co-curated the exhibition Real Estates, opening PEER Gallery up as a social, discursive and imaginative space around issues of housing and spatial justice; developed an interactive website Balfron Tower: a building archive and co-coordinated a successful campaign to list Balfron Tower at Grade II*.
David has exhibited, screened, installed and published work related to housing and spatial justice, critical methodologies and site-specific practice. David’s PhD thesis in Architectural Design, Make Public: Performing public housing in regenerating east London, explored the history and future of two east London housing estates facing demolition and privatisation. He was supervised by Professor Jane Rendell and Dr Ben Campkin, won a RIBA President’s Award for Research 2016 and received a High Commendation.
Along with Jane Rendell, David has been invited to become members of the steering group for the RIBA Ethics Commission. Following this, he is working on a talk series with Professor Jeremy Till, Head of Central St Martins and Pro-Vice Chancellor of the University of the Arts.
He was awarded a commendation for his paper on ethical codes at the RIBA Research Awards 2018.
Guidance notes
Ethics advice prepared in August 2018 by Dr David Roberts, and updated in July 2023 by Professor Jane Rendell, for students in the Bartlett who are conducting research projects
Practising ethics
Practisingethics.org is a web-based resource devised by Dr David Roberts (Bartlett Ethics Fellow 2015-20) and edited by Professor Jane Rendell (Director of the Bartlett Ethics Commission 2015-20) and Dr Yael Padan. A collaboration between the Bartlett’s Ethics Commission and Work Package 3: The Ethics of Research Practice as part of KNOW (Knowledge in Action for Urban Equality), it is an 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, blindspots, and moonshots of ethical processes.
- Making Images (David Roberts)
- Asking Questions (Yael Padan)
- Co-Producing Knowledge (Yael Padan)
- Staging Exhibiting (David Roberts)
- Researching, Risk, and Wellbeing (Ariana Markowitz)
- Researching Internationally (Emmanuel Osuteye)
- Analysing Secondary Data. (by Tania Guerrero Rios & Jens Kandt)
- Co-Writing Research. (by Alejandro Vallejo and Catalina Ortiz)