If Collective Building and Design was my apprenticeship in the building industry, this was my intellectual and theoretical apprenticeship into radical literature and Marxist political economy that I first confronted during my Masters degree at UCL in 1987. A broad ranging international collection of researchers and activists including Trade Unionists, planners, historians and architects it offered a critique of the capitalist built environment and held an annual summer school each of which was published in proceedings. Its focus was on the production of the built environment and accordingly there were a number of recurrent themes; land and rent; the history and political economy of the building industry; housing and urban development; workers' struggles and the history of the construction labour process. Truly international in terms of its membership and interests it hosted conferences in places as far afield as Sao Paulo, Mexico, Brussels, London, Glasgow, and Moscow.
It also gave me a window to publish a number of essays on architecture and building. Resisting the End-Game. The terminal extinction of architecture, (Volume 17, Glasgow, 1995), Dead Zones, (Volume 15, Roubaix, 1993), Ideology and the Labour Process, (Volume 14 , Brussels, 1993), Slogans Revisited - Perestroika and the Soviet built environment, (Volume 12, Moscow, 1992), Architecture, production and ideology, ( Volume 11, Paris, 1989)
See attached PDF for a full bibliography of conference papers