Can construction be industrialised?

Yes. It already has been, on four continents. The question is why we are still arguing about it.

Industrialisation is not a factory.

That one misunderstanding has burned more money than any technical failure. A factory is one part of a chain running from land and brief through funding, design, manufacture, assembly, handover and maintenance. Bolt a factory onto an unchanged process and you have an expensive shed with one customer.

Why it is so slow

→ A bank will lend against a half-built house it can see and repossess. It will not lend the same way against walls sitting in a factory it does not own. → Insurers charge more for anything new, and nothing back when the hundredth identical home is safer than the first. → Consultants are paid a percentage of cost. Cheaper buildings pay them less. → A concrete panel, a bathroom pod and a finished steel-framed flat are all sold as "modular". Nobody compares like with like. → Governments announce ten-year pipelines, then buy one scheme at a time.

Why so many failed

Katerra. Ilke. House by Urban Splash. L&G Modular. They built the factory before they had the orders, designed a different building every time, and tried to own every part of the chain at once. Manufacturers without customers.

Why others succeed

Asia — Japan. Sekisui and Daiwa sell the same house designs for fifty years, improve them yearly, and service them for the life of the home. Europe — Sweden. Lindbäcks and BoKlok start with what a nurse can afford, then engineer the house back to that price. Middle East — Saudi Arabia. A Riyadh plant now turns out up to 400,000 cubic metres of precast panels a year for ROSHN's communities. Be clear what that is: a panel factory, not an industrialised industry. But ROSHN guaranteed the pipeline and the investment followed. Guarantee the work and the capacity arrives.

The missing piece

A panel maker, a pod maker, a lender and a repairs contractor are all parts. Nobody joins them into a whole. No agreed definitions, no agreed way for parts from different makers to fit together, nobody in charge of the chain. Until that changes we keep paying for pieces and calling it progress.

What has to change

Buy the same thing twice, then twice again. Standardise how parts meet, not how buildings look. Creativity will flow even when using standards parts. Freeze the design at the start, not the end. Secure the orders before the factory.

The bank, the valuer, the insurer, the minister, the housing association and the manufacturer all have to move at once. That is exactly why so little has moved.

35 million social housing units are needed worldwide every year. We are not going to hand-build our way out of that.

Change is slow because we keep trying to industrialise a process we refuse to redesign.

And there needs to be a central focus to enable from A to Z

Andrew J Bannister GUILD of MMC

#MMC #SocialHousing