The Built Environment: Definition and Scope

W e all build and therefore make important contributions to the built environment. We design and build our lives from one experience to another. Based on those experiences, components of the built environment emerge from human needs, thoughts, and actions. Sometimes the substances of human actions are grand, and we design and plan quality life experiences for ourselves and others. At other times, human actions are shortsighted, creating uncomfortable situations that are less fit for healthy human activities and negatively impact the environments that surround us and with which we are in constant interaction. There are many reasons to design, plan, and build. Each aspect of the built environment is created to fulfill human purpose. As those purposes and actions are mani-fold, so too are the reasons to design and build. Where you are sitting while reading this page, you are surrounded by hundreds of human-created objects, all contributing components of your built environment. The words on this page, this book, your chair and desk, the nearby stereo, the cell phone and Internet that connect you to many others throughout the world, even the walls, floor, and ceiling of the space are humanly made or arranged and therefore part of the built environment. These components are constructed by dozens, hundreds, even thousands of material products and production systems. Look further afield and observe the variety of objects and environments out of the window. Buildings, automobiles, roads, bridges, the landscaped areas, parks, and the surrounding city are also part of a human-made or-arranged built environment. Imagine the range and complexity of environmental components, the magnitude of environments beyond your home: cities, highways , and other transport systems, parcels of agricultural land, even domesticated plants and animals—all are to some degree the products of human artifice and should be included. All people everywhere are surrounded by an abundance of components of the human-created world. It may actually be harder to find environments that are completely outside the built environment, not made or arranged, maintained or controlled by people or society, if such still exist on this planet. The sky, weather, free-flowing rivers, and wilderness areas may seem untouched, but none are totally free from human intervention and impacts. The cumulative results of the changes people have made in their surrounding environment are extensive expressions of past and present cultures. A large percentage of humanity lives in urban metropolitan areas. These massive urban …