Speaking for the social

This book sets out with a programmatic agenda to find new ways of ‘speaking for the social’. Rather than exploring the fault line of technical vs. social disciplines, this volume proposes that persistent miscommunication between them rests on deep, but often unarticulated distinctions in the way these disciplines conceptualise ‘the social’. Taking this as our starting point, the chapters of the book present a series of experimental, collaborative, and revisionist approaches to tracing, unravelling and communicating the social dimensions of technical projects, each of which emerges from the confrontation of different implicit understandings of what the social is, where one might find it and how it can be accounted for.

Valuing design

Recent debates in placemaking have focused on the social benefits of design, and the monetary value attributed to these social benefits (Design Council 2021). Nevertheless, such financial calculations leave notable gaps. The abstract figures from cost-benefit-analysis appear far removed from the messiness and social complexity of lived reality, and architects must reconcile the types of value held in spreadsheets with the value that is shaped and expressed by people living and working on the ground. How are different standards of value created, reconciled, and to what end? Drawing on anthropological theories of value, this project explores how actors create value systems for themselves and constantly switch between different modes and models of value. Rather than ask what value is, this project asks what value does for architectural design (Miller 2008). As we emerge from a pandemic in which there will be renewed emphasis on improvement (Strathern 1996) and the urge to create universal theories of value, it advocates for a more complex view which leaves scope for difference.