Built Environment

The built environment consists of those fixed, permanent elements of the landscape that people have created. The term usually refers to urban places, where it may include open spaces. It reflects and shapes culture in ways difficult to measure or theorize. Research on the topic is interdisciplinary; apart from geographers, it interests architects, planners, urbanists, and those studying population, health, and climate change.

Buildings are produced in one of three ways: (1) by contractors for specific clients, (2) on speculation for unknown buyers, or (3) by landowners for their own use. The only element commonly produced on speculation, or by owners for their own use, is housing. Governments shape the built environment, especially in urban areas. As clients, they arrange for the construction of some offices and housing, together with most other infrastructure. Municipal building regulations determine how the structures should be built; health and other codes regulate their maintenance; and zoning bylaws determine what types of buildings may be erected in which locations. Municipal planners try to frame patterns of land use, but their power to do so in democratic societies is limited. Authoritarian societies can more easily shape, and reshape, the built environment but at the expense of those displaced.

The built environment reflects society and culture, broadly defined, in ways that theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu and Bruno Latour have [Page 299]attempted to clarify. In Western societies, individualism is expressed, for example, in the prevalence of the single-family dwelling. Social class can be read in the varied residential landscape that extends from mansions to shacks and in the associated inequalities in access to schools, parks, and other public services. Most families prefer to raise children in lower-density suburbs, while singles, gays, and childless couples have helped fashion gentrified neighborhoods and urbane living. In societies of immigrants, ethnic traditions are visibly juxtaposed in varied house styles, signs, and storefronts. In Muslim societies, assumptions about the appropriate role of women are embodied, for example, in the walled courtyard dwellings. Capitalism, including the state-sponsored version of modern-day China, presents itself in skyscrapers; authoritarian regimes, of whatever ideological persuasion, favor monuments, large stadia, and pretentious public buildings; and religious societies, such as the medieval cities of Western Europe, erect prominent houses of God.

Hong Kong, an island in the Pearl River Delta, is an international financial center with a population of 7 million.

Source: Justin Horrocks/iStockphoto.

Societies that value the past resist the destruction of the built environment; modernizers promote creative destruction in the name of progress. Buildings reinforce the social relations and cultural values that created them, although how and to what extent is often unclear. Environments developed for families who own two or more cars mandate the use of the automobile and present economic barriers to public transit. Pretentious buildings may inspire awe. Built environments also have consequences that no one anticipated and that we may learn to regret. Low-density suburban development discourages pedestrians and may have contributed to rising levels of obesity and related health problems. It encourages the use of inanimate sources of energy, with [Page 300]consequences for climate change that were neither intended nor even recognized when such areas were first developed. The permanence of the built environment is both positive and negative.

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