Prefabs in the North of England: Technological, environmental and social innovations

Abstract

Advances in digital technology have inaugurated a 'fourth industrial revolution', enabling, inter alia, the growth of 'offsite' housing construction in advanced economies. This productive transformation seems to be opening up new opportunities for styles of living, ownership, place-making and manufacturing that are more sustainable, democratic and bespoke. However, the full potential of this transformation is not yet clear nor how it will interact with-in the UK context-ongoing crises in housing provision rooted in an increasingly financialised and critically unbalanced national economy, timid state housing policies and a longstanding cultural preoccupation with mortgaged 'bricks and mortar' housing. In this paper, we report on an ongoing mixed method project interrogating the technological, environmental and social implications of the emergence of offsite housing construction in the UK. To a degree, we situate this interrogation in the Northern English region of Yorkshire, an emerging focal point of the growing offsite construction industry in the UK but an area afflicted by entrenched, post-industrial economic imbalances. The results show that offsite house engineers, designers and builders are innovatively embracing digital methods, a low carbon agenda and new approaches to place-making but that they have had little role, so far, in resolving the deeper structural problems affecting housing production in the UK, bringing the sustainability of their innovation into question.