Ethics and the Built Environment 2009

Nottingham UK
Wednesday 9 – Friday 11 September

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The second Ethics and the Built Environment Conference has now taken place. The organisers would like to thank the authors, conference committee and all who helped and attended what was a productive and enjoyable three days. This web site will remain on-line for a few weeks. The Conference proceedings will be available soon on CD.

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Introduction

The first Ethics and the Built Environment Conference, Ethics of Building, was held in the Lake District of England in 1999. Ten years later, the scene has changed. There is widespread recognition of professional responsibilities to confront environmental issues – not just climate change – and the last year or so has brought a radical shift in the economic and social contexts of building and construction.

The field has also developed through new books that take an avowedly ethical stance on design and the built environment, including The Ethical Architect (Tom Spector), Ethics and the Built Environment (edited by Warwick Fox), Understanding Sustainable Architecture (Terry Williamson, Antony Radford and Helen Bennetts), and Architecture and its Ethical Dilemmas (edited by Nicholas Ray). Warwick Fox, who convened the 1999 conference, has published his Theory of General Ethics, an ethics that explicitly embraces the built environment.

Ethics has become an established and influential subdiscipline in the fields of medicine, law and even business. The discourse remains fragmented in the fields of the built environment.

Conference Aims

This 2009 conference aims to be an informed interdisciplinary forum in which to:

1. Continue the debate on the ethical dimensions of the built environment in all its forms
2. Celebrate and critique what has been achieved in the last decade
3. Contribute significantly towards establishing an agenda for the development of a coherent subdiscipline of ethics in the built environment, and
4. Propose some new approaches to the kinds of questions that arise when we contemplate the ethics of the built environment.

Organisation

Ethics and the Built Environment 2009 is a joint venture between the University of Adelaide, Australia, School of Architecture, Landscape Architecture & Urban Design and the University of Nottingham, UK, School of the Built Environment.

Conference Location

The conference will be held at the School of the Built Environment, the University of Nottingham.