Theology is perhaps not the first subject area to which an engineer might turn for insights into the built environment. A Theology of the Built Environment, however, provides a rich source of thinking on values in relation to the built environment and, as a consequence of drawing on literature from a wide range of disciplines, Gorringe crafts a book that makes stimulating reading for engineers.
The book is divided into ten chapters that consider the following: constructed space, land, human dwelling, the nature and relation of town and country, the meaning of cities and means of constructing community. The book is centrally concerned with human values in relation to the built environment and Gorringe quotes the Roman engineer/architect Vitruvious's view that ‘we become human only when we build’, and he goes on to recognise that every design encompassing a human view will then shape ‘community’. The dialectical relationship here is that ideology is dependent on the space we create, but our use of space describes and affects our ideology. Gorringe asserts that humans ‘dwell’ (with connotations of the highest form of living) when they experience their environment as meaningful: he suggests that people ‘ensoul’ their places and then these places ensoul them. He quotes Churchill's statement in the Houses of Parliament that ‘we shape our buildings and then our buildings shape us’.
Turning to issues connected with land, Gorringe confirms that its possession or otherwise has been the main focus of inequity and injustice throughout human history, and this is contrasted with the need for human security and the need to put down roots in order to flourish. The ‘promised land’ for some is the dispossessed land of others and, drawing on liberation theology's ‘bias towards the poor’, the concern should always be for those who do not have their ‘stake’.
More contentiously perhaps for professional engineers, Gorringe quotes Ivan Illich's suggestion that there are problems with the professionalisation of knowledge because it ‘makes people dependent on having their knowledge produced for them’. He suggests in contradistinction that problems associated with ‘dwelling’ are, however, ethical ones rather than technical ones. The reviewer recognises this view in relation to his own discipline of transport: the technical specifications are interesting and demanding to solve, but are all a consequence of policy, and it is policy decision-making that necessarily has to appraise itself of consequences and impacts.
Turning to the city, on the one hand Gorringe celebrates the city and quotes Ellul, who suggests that the city is the product of goodwill resulting from ‘the engineer's bright eye, the urbanist's broad sweep of mind, the hygienist's idealism’. He also warns against the hubris of cities through recognition of the hinterland they require. Again somewhat interestingly, he asserts an aesthetic point of view that ‘cities ultimately exist to make metaphysical contemplation possible for a tiny number of leisured citizens’.
Considering the shape of cities, he reflects concerns with the way public space is deliberately eliminated by, for example, gated communities and shopping malls that have the ability to evict undesirables. There are parallels perhaps with Hausmann's construction of wide boulevards in Paris in the nineteenth century as a means of controlling potential unrest. Clearly, as Gorringe suggests, there are milieu that make for, and milieu that militate against, community, which is ‘born afresh in each generation’.
In the closing stages of the book Gorringe quotes Ruskin and one of the many examples of how ‘sustainable development’ has been framed in earlier ages: ‘[life] belongs as much to those who follow us as it does to us … and we have no right … to deprive them of the benefit we have in our power to bequeath’.
Theology has many strands and reading it would usually require a degree of knowledge about the many ‘schools of thought’, but this book has the virtue of firmly establishing itself on particular theological grounds, and yet remaining accessible to a non-theologically specialist audience. The book has a lot to offer anyone with interests in shaping the built environment, and with apologies to the author for no doubt having been oblivious to subtleties of theological argument, it can be recommended as reading for engineers engaged in applying their ‘bright eye’ to built environment problems.
