Article
Choose Your Future: A feminist
perspective on Construction 4.0 as
Techno-Utopia or Digital Dystopia
Barrett, Jennifer Eve ORCID: 0000-0002-6795-1615 (2020) Choose Your
Future: A feminist perspective on Construction 4.0 as Techno-Utopia or Digital
Dystopia. Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers: Management,
Procurement and Law, 173 (1). pp. 1-5. ISSN 1751-4304
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Accepted manuscript
doi: 10.1680/jmapl.20.00003
1
Accepted manuscript
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Accepted manuscript
doi: 10.1680/jmapl.20.00003
2
Submitted: 31 January 2020
Published online in ‘accepted manuscript’ format: 04 April 2020
Manuscript title: Choose Your Future: A Feminist Perspective on Construction 4.0 as
Techno-Utopia or Digital Dystopia
Author: Jenni Barrett
Affiliation: Faculty of Culture & Creative Industries, University of Central Lancashire,
Preston, PR1 2HE, United Kingdom.
Corresponding author: Jenni Barrett, Faculty of Culture & Creative Industries, University of
Central Lancashire, Preston, PR1 2HE, United Kingdom. Tel.: 01772 893240
E-mail: jebarrett@uclan.ac.uk
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Accepted manuscript
doi: 10.1680/jmapl.20.00003
3
Abstract
In 2017, the Chancellor of the Exchequer launched the UK Industrial Strategy, inviting us to
“choose the future.” Via government support for and investment in digital innovation,
particularly in the construction industry and public infrastructure, the Strategy aimed to
stimulate the UK’s industrial productivity and wealth. This paper examines the Industrial
Strategy by applying it within the context of the utopian/dystopian literature genre, and through
a feminist lens. The paper finds that the Strategy looks set to deliver outcomes similar to
themes of dystopian literature genre which imagine that technological progress can only
achieved at the expense of social equity, suggesting that the currently gendered idea of
Construction 4.0 could exacerbate current gender divisions and inequalities that currently
blight the construction industry. Given more balanced strategic support and investment,
Construction 4.0 might actually, in a new reality, offer opportunities to resolve issues of gender
equity in the industry. The paper concludes with a timely call to researchers and industry
professionals to intersect gender inclusivity across all aspects of future research, innovation,
and strategy in relation to Construction 4.0, so that the chosen future will support the careers
and contributions of all genders that choose to participate in it.
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Accepted manuscript
doi: 10.1680/jmapl.20.00003
4
1. An introduction to the utopia/dystopia genre
Before Thomas More even coined the term, visions of ‘utopia’ (More, 1516) (meaning an ideal
city or society) have frequently been described as an egalitarian society, and unusually for a
historical legacy of writing dominated by men, a feminist one. The city-state of Plato’s
Republic (Plato, c. 375B.C.E.) was governed by male and female philosopher-guardians.
Later, the Land of Cockaigne described in the Kildare Poems around 1330 (Lucas, 1995) was
described as a land where women and men could be truly equal. In The Book of the City of
Ladies, Christine de Pizan (de Pizan, 1405) went further to describe an ideal city built by
women for women, as a refuge from the patriarchy.
Then followed a shift in the utopic vision, suggesting the ideal society as one
characterised by economic competitiveness and technological innovation. In New Atlantis
(Bacon, 1626), Elizabethan statesman, Francis Bacon, argued that England’s utopia would be
forged, not by the probity of our social structures, but by our ability to invent machines that
could guarantee the country’s competitiveness on the world stage, with a clearly binary
representation of technological innovation as a masculine pursuit, with nature as symbolically
feminine (Aughterson, 2003). This introduced a tension between social aspirations of equity
and the more masculine technological endeavour.
At this point, the utopian genre diverges into a tense relationship between social and
technological disruption, with themes selecting either the egalitarian society or the technocracy
as their ultimate vision. It is precisely this uncomfortable tension between the binary ideals of
social and industrial transformation that then generated a darker imagining of our society’s
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