Built environment
Various aspects of the built environment contribute to scholarship on housing and segregation, physical activity, food access, climate change, and environmental racism.
Below are some prominent examples of what makes up the urban fabric: Buildings are used for a multitude of purposes: residential, commercial, community, institutional, and governmental.
Building interiors are often designed to mediate external factors and provide space to conduct activities, whether that is to sleep, eat, work, etc.
[15] The term describes a wide range of fields that form an interdisciplinary concept that has been accepted as an idea since classical antiquity[16] and potentially before.
[17] This switch, also called the Neolithic Revolution,[18] was the beginning of favoring permanent settlements and altering the land to grow crops and farm animals.
The built environment, while not as extensive as it is today, was beginning to be cultivated with the implementation of buildings, paths, farm land, domestication of animals and plants, etc.
Over the next several thousand years, these smaller cities and villages grew into larger ones where trade, culture, education, and economics were driving factors.
[21] This rapid growth in population in cities led to issues of noise, sanitation, health problems, traffic jams, pollution, compact living quarters, etc.
[23] The invention of cars, as well as train usage, became more accessible to the general masses due to the advancements in the steel, chemicals, and fuel generated production.
[26] Suburbs blurred the line of city "borders", the day-to-day life that may have originally been relegated to a pedestrian radius now encompassed a wide range of distances due to the use of cars and public transportation.
Currently, the built environment is typically used to describe the interdisciplinary field that encompasses the design, construction, management, and use of human-made physical influence as an interrelated whole.
[27] It can be argued that the forests and wild-life parks that are held on a pedestal and are seemingly natural are in reality curated and allowed to exist for the enjoyment of the human experience.
Historically, unsanitary conditions and overcrowding within cities and urban environments have led to infectious diseases and other health threats.
During the 19th century in particular, the connection between the built environment and public health became more apparent as life expectancy decreased and diseases, as well as epidemics, increased.
Urban forms that encourage physical activity and provide adequate public resources for involvement and upward mobility are proven to have far healthier populations than those that discourage such uses of the built environment.
[36] Even less physically imposing features, such as architectural design, can distinguish the boundaries between communities and decrease movement across neighborhood lines.
[4] George Galster and Patrick Sharkey refer to this variation in geographic context as "spatial opportunity structure", and claim that the built environment influences socioeconomic outcomes and general welfare.
[9] The historical segregation has contributed to environmental injustice, as these neighborhoods suffer from hotter summers since urban asphalt absorbs more heat than trees and grass.
The inability to feasibly move from forcibly economically depressed areas into more prosperous ones creates fiscal disadvantages that are passed down generationally.
[42] Urban heat islands are pockets of higher temperature areas, typically within cities, that effect the environment, as well as quality of life.
