Sites of Construction: Connected Histories

Sites of construction: connected histories reconceptualises construction as a dispersed, multi-sited, and interdisciplinary field of practice. Challenging the traditional centrality of the building site, this volume traces the legal, logistical, educational, colonial, political, and social forces that shape the production of the historic built environment.

Drawing on the EOS research project Above and Beyond Construction History, the contributors illuminate how expertise, labour, regulation, and material flows are formed across a range of unexpected sites, from vocational schools and chambers of the investigating judge to distribution centres, business lunches, protest-filled streets, warehouses that temporarily housed colonial labourers, and depots storing surplus brick. Combining empirically grounded historical case studies with methodological reflection, this book reveals how construction was, and remains, constituted through networks of actors, institutions, and knowledge practices that operate far beyond the fence line.

Sites of Construction thus offers an urgent interdisciplinary perspective on how buildings truly come into being, foregrounding the heterogeneity of construction processes and their entanglement with broader societal transformations.