SOCIAL COMMISSIONING: A RELATIONAL APPROACH TO SOCIAL VALUE CREATION IN THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT

Social commissioning: a relational approach to building performance

The project explores new ways of understanding and articulating social aspects of building performance. Through a combination of anthropology and evaluation theory, social commissioning is proposed as a framework for supporting the social value creation of the built environment, throughout the building lifecycle. Focusing on what the buildings make possible (performed relations) rather than what they are (pre-formed substances) and applying an understanding of buildings as interventions in complex systems to translate a relational approach to agency to an equally relational approach to impact.

Social Commissioning is about the entanglements, the events, and the relational performances of sociomaterial practices in which these new structures form part, create new openings, and make new relations possible. It is about finding ways of making social aspects count, without reducing them to static entities with a defined set of attributes, precise numbers, or absolute values.