The aim of the SCIBE proposal is to explore the relationship between scarcity and creativity in the context of the built environment by investigating how conditions of scarcity might affect the creativity of the different actors involved in the production of architecture and urban design, and how a design-led innovation of the process could improve the built environment in the future. The research is based on the analysis of housing projects and their urban settings in four different European contexts (UK/London, Norway/Stavanger, Iceland/Reykjavik, Austria/Vienna), which together form the empirical ground for the study. Each case takes a particular view of scarcity, in order that we can investigate the various kinds of parameters that shape the construction of scarcity in different social, cultural, geographic, and temporal contexts. The built environment has been chosen as the context for the research because it expands the conventional aesthetic understanding of creativity to include wide ranging societal forces.
