From Labour to Logistics

During the 1960s, the price of construction nearly doubled in Belgium due to rising material and labour costs in the sector. Yet at development firm Amelinckx, prices lowered significantly in that same period. This is the result of the housing developers’ efforts to streamline his building activities into a ‘well-oiled machine’ including efficient organisational techniques that led to the extremely fast execution of projects. This paper studies the history of innovation in the Belgian construction industry through a detailed analysis of the construction processes put in place by François Amelinckx (1898–1975), founder of Amelinckx N.V. (1936-1985). This developer constructed over 50,000 apartments between 1929 and 1985, making him the largest housing developer in twentieth-century Belgium. During the 1960s, Amelinckx’ dozens simultaneous construction sites allowed the in-house construction teams (plumbers, electricians, floorers, carpenters, painters, etc.) to move easily from one site to another. Detailed planning schedules organised these teams, listing strict maximum allotted timings for each phase to prevent unexpected gaps in timing and thus delays. As a result, the construction process went quicker, but also, the temps mort of employees (and thus labour costs) was reduced significantly.

By analysing these planning schedules (see image) as a unique lens to study the role of time and cost planning in Amelinckx' success, this paper examines to what extent the firm’s efficiency was driven by human knowledge and skills versus technological and managerial innovation. As such, this unique source sheds light on how development and construction companies in the 1960s responded to rising labour costs and social challenges of the Belgian construction sector as well as to the rapidly growing demand for high-quality housing. Such an analysis potentially contains important clues to understand the interaction between social dynamics and technical innovations in the construction sector, and how corporate strategies and sectoral evolutions influenced each other in the post-war decades.