Challenges ahead: why relational research is vital for society and reduces dysfunction and disaster

Sarah Darby (University of Oxford) reflects on relationality and why it matters, urgently. This is based on insights from two events from the same day, in September 2024. One was a family rite of passage; the other, publication of a report into the causes of a wholly avoidable disaster, the destruction by fire of a block of social housing. The case for researchers working with practitioners and developing a common language has never been stronger.

Co-construction of people and communities

Our first grandchild, like Buildings & Cities, is five years old. He recently started school - a small, commonplace happening in the grand scheme of things, a big event for him and his family. The school, with 500 pupils and classes of 30, is a big step up from the intimate scales of home and nursery. Each new pupil will have to learn and work at a set of new relationships: with the other children, the staff, and the rules, routines and materials of school life.

From the street, the school building looks typical of many in London. It's very obviously urban: there are no playing fields on site for the children, only two stretches of tarmac roughly the size of tennis courts, two smaller play areas and a tiny garden. But the ageing premises are clearly cared for and the staff project a strong ethos of kindness, inclusion, encouragement and resilience. Some of the older pupils wear 'Buddy' badges, shield-shaped. They have been trained to identify and resist bullying, and to encourage pupils to be - in their words - upstanders rather than bystanders. They keep an eye on the playground Buddy Bench and are ready to listen and respond to any lonely or troubled children who go there.  

A school has many obligations: to pass on knowledge and skills, encourage understanding; to socialise children, carry out pastoral care, promote health and wellbeing, liaise with parents and other carers, and maintain the fabric of the building, its equipment and surroundings. Most of these functions must be measured, recorded and open to inspection. A well-functioning school, in the face of all these demands, is a relational triumph, one that must be worked for every day in the face of financial, social, educational and political pressures.

Schools are surely one of the vital elements of a city and this is especially true of state primary schools, each identified with a particular locality and the people who live there. Ideally, the relationships within and beyond the classrooms help to produce upstanders, children who will, one day, build, maintain and govern whatever emerges from the cities of today.

Co-destruction: laying the foundations for disaster

On my regular journeys into London to help with the grandchildren, the coach passes through a small area of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. It is one of most deprived localities in the UK, yet one that is governed and administered by the wealthiest local authority (Macleod 2018). In this impoverished patch of an affluent borough stands the shrouded remnant of a 24-storey block of social housing, Grenfell Tower. At the top, visible to all passers-by, are huge banners with heart logos and the words 'Grenfell forever in our hearts'. On the night of 14 June  2017 a faulty refrigerator in a fourth-floor flat ignited a fire that spread, within two panic-stricken hours, to the whole tower. The tower's cladding, intended to improve the insulation, was known by the manufacturers to be flammable. They deliberately concealed this knowledge from buyers and the cladding was installed by the Borough as a cheap alternative to the original specification.  Seventy-two residents died; three had fallen from windows in a last attempt to escape the flames. A further 70 were injured and all survivors were rendered homeless.

The official report on the Grenfell disaster has just been published. It is thorough, detailed and unsparing, with the summary conclusion that:

'the fire at Grenfell Tower was the culmination of decades of failure by central government and other bodies in positions of responsibility in the construction industry to look carefully into the danger of incorporating combustible materials into the external walls of high-rise residential buildings and to act on the information available to them.'

(Grenfell Tower Inquiry 2024, section 2.4)

The installation of unsafe cladding was the main contributory factor to the rapid spread of the fire and the deaths, injury, loss and trauma that followed. But it was by no means the only one. For example, the report details how Grenfell residents raised safety issues with the Tenant Management Organisation (TMO), and how

'… from 2011 to 2017 relations between the TMO and many of the residents of the tower were increasingly characterised by distrust, dislike, personal antagonism and anger. Some, perhaps many, occupants of Grenfell Tower regarded the TMO as an uncaring and bullying overlord, which belittled and marginalised them, regarded them as a nuisance or worse, and simply failed to take their concerns seriously…. the TMO regarded some of the residents as militant troublemakers led on by a handful of vocal activists … [they] lost sight of the fact that the residents were people who depended on it for a safe and decent home and the privacy and dignity that a home should provide. That dependence created an unequal relationship and a corresponding need for the TMO to ensure that, whatever the difficulties, the residents were treated with understanding and respect… We have concluded that the TMO failed to recognise that need and therefore failed to take the steps necessary to ensure that it was met.'

(Grenfell Tower Inquiry 2024, sections 2.55-56)

The report tells how the tower, a product of so many complex processes¹, burned because of a series of linked relational failings over several decades: failures in care for rules and standards, institutions and processes, materials and individuals. Many people bear some responsibility for this disaster - and for the recovery and prevention processes that are still under way. In July 2024, the UK Government published figures showing that over 4,600 buildings 11m or more in height had been identified with unsafe cladding. Yet, seven years after the Grenfell fire, remediation work had only been undertaken on half of these and the work had been completed in only 29% (MHCLG 2024). Tens of thousands of residents in high-rise buildings still live in fear of fire, while thousands have been unable to sell their homes after discovering they have unsafe cladding (BBC 2020). Training in the construction industry is in dire need of reform (Killip 2020); compliance with building regulations is poor (Garmiston & Pan 2013); inequality is still a major affliction (Warner et al. 2024). It's said that success has many parents but failure is an orphan. The Grenfell report demonstrates how determined, systematic research, powered by shock and a sense of injustice, can uncover the many contributors to a disaster and offer a basis for avoiding more of the same.

Short-term research challenges for resilience, community and regeneration

Global heating is the condition that our descendants are now born into and treating it in techno-optimist terms merely as a 'problem' with 'solutions' looks increasingly untenable. Recognising relationality in the achievements and failings of our buildings and cities, and developing fair and caring structures within which stakeholders at different levels can operate and communicate, can help avert disasters and promote healthy communities. To achieve this, immediate challenges for research and practice should be about learning-by-doing: implementing and assessing socio-technical approaches to climate mitigation and adaptation, recognising their complexity, to establish what works for whom, where and when (Nielsen & Miraglia 2017).

Rapid developments in digitisation, decentralised energy and the growth of cities only add to the urgency of testing innovations in real-life situations and understanding the relationships and care practices that can lead to social welfare or breakdown (Darby 2019; Lucas-Healey et al. 2022; Karvonen & Hargreaves 2023).

The Grenfell disaster has shown us a terrible model of dysfunction, with a lack of care at its core. Schools, in contrast - care-based institutions - can offer models of imperfect but largely functional adaptation to change. There are, of course, many other examples of how vital relationality is for research and practice in the built environment - many opportunities.  Researching relationality is no longer a 'nice-to-have'; it is more than ever essential.

Note

1. See Meacham (2022) for a socio-technical analysis of fire risk with Modern Methods of Construction.

References

BBC. (2020). Imprisoned by cladding: the flat owners who cannot sell. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-51412328

Darby, S.J. (2019). Smart and sustainable, fast and slow. Proceedings, European Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy Summer Study, paper 5-318-19.

Garmiston, H. & Pan, W. (2013). Non-Compliance with Building Energy Regulations: The Profile, Issues, and Implications on Practice and Policy in England and Wales. Journal of Sustainable Development of Energy, Water and Environment Systems, 1(4), 340-351

Grenfell Tower Inquiry Phase 2 Report. (2024). https://www.grenfelltowerinquiry.org.uk/phase-2-report

Karvonen, A. & Hargreaves, T. (2023). Data politics in the built environment. Buildings and Cities, 4(1), 920-926. https://doi.org/10.5334/bc.394

Killip, G. (2020).A reform agenda for UK construction education and practice. Buildings & Cities, 1(1), 525-537. https://doi.org/10.5334/bc.43

Lucas-Healey, K., Ransan-Cooper, H., Temby, H. & Russell, A.W. (2022). Who cares? How care practices uphold the decentralised energy order. Buildings and Cities, 3(1), pp. 448-463. https://doi.org/10.5334/bc.219

Macleod, G. (2018). The Grenfell Tower atrocity. Exposing urban worlds of inequality, injustice, and an impaired democracy. City, 22(4), 460-489. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2018.1507099

Meacham, B.J. (2022). Fire performance and regulatory considerations with modern methods of construction. Buildings and Cities 3(1), 464-487. https://doi.org/10.5334/bc.201

MHCLG. (2024). Building Safety Remediation: monthly data release - 31 July 2024. UK Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/building-safety-remediation-monthly-data-release-july-2024/building-safety-remediation-monthly-data-release-31-july-2024

Nielsen, K. & Miraglia, M. (2017). What works for whom in which circumstances? On the need to move beyond the 'what works?' question in organizational intervention research. Human Relations 70(1), 40-62. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726716670226

Warner, S., Newman, J., Diamond, P. & Richards, D. (2024). The challenge of devolved English governance and the rise of political spatial inequality. Parliamentary Affairs, gsae024, https://doi.org/10.1093/pa/gsae024