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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Katie LLoyd Thomas
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Faced with the near absence of women on the building site in many parts of the contemporary world (and their invisibility Sérgio Ferro’s writing) how do we ensure Production Studies does not become a field that erases women – or imagines them outside production, either on the ‘reception’ (user) side or involved only with social reproduction? To do this the chapter looks at the enormous expansion in the use of building products - factory-made materials and components such as tiles, boilers, cables, paints, insulation, pipes and so on. In the UK these proprietary products became a major part of the building industry in the interwar period when housebuilding was one of the few buoyant areas of production. The change brought architects into close relations and collaborations with manufacturers. It also provided many new forms of employment away from the construction site. On the one hand, building product factories sprang up on the periphery of many urban centres, often close to the new housing provision. Archival and photographic evidence from shows that many of these workers were women – involved in tasks across the factory floor. On the other, women were widely involved in promoting products to architects and builders, and in training new consumers in their use. Their entry into these technical realms feminised what had previously been masculine arenas. They were mediators AND producers of the built environment, not just consumers and contributors to social reproduction. We can understand these changes via Ferro’s argument that building construction needs to continue as manufacture because of its major role in the provision of ‘fresh surplus value’. First, building products were additional, peripheral products which could supplement rather than replace traditional forms of value-intensive building labour. They enabled an expansion of the building materials industry beyond the construction site, as well as the entry of new materials and sites of extraction into building processes. And second, they introduced a new low-waged workforce into the building industry behind closed doors – women. Asking ‘where are the women in the production of the built environment?’ reveals a wider set of sites and actors involved in construction and its associated activities which enable us to catch sight of key transformations around building, design and labour, and identify an expanded range of sites and questions for Production Studies research.
Author(s): Lloyd Thomas K
Editor(s): Matt Davies, Will Thomson, Katie Lloyd Thomas, João Marcos de Almeida Lopes
Publication type: Book Chapter
Publication status: In Press
Book Title: Building Sites: Architecture, Labour and the New Field of Production Studies
Year: 2026
Acceptance date: 02/04/2018
Number of Volumes: 1
Publisher: Routledge
Place Published: London
URL: https://www.routledge.com/Building-Sites-Architecture-Labour-and-Production-Studies/Davies-Thomson-LloydThomas-deAlmeidaLopes/p/book/9781032788845
Notes: Publication due 19 December 2025
Library holdings: Search Newcastle University Library for this item
ISBN: 9781032788845
