Issues of the Built Environment

1.7. Issues of the Built Environment:

The human-dominated built environment now existed on vast areas of the Earth's surface, and it is hard to define areas that are not affected by human activity. The impacts that, human actions have had on the natural environment in the past 10,000 years are so negative that, there emerged international efforts to protect the natural environment and earth’s Ecosystem due to creation of the built environment. 

At first emerged the Montreal Protocol that protects the ozone layer from excessive depletion, and the Kyoto Protocol attempted to reduce greenhouse gases emissions in order to protect the integrity of all ecosystems from climate change. Both these conventions required substantial ‘investment’ by humans in protecting and regenerating what might traditionally be defined as ‘natural’ systems or ecosystem services. 

At global level natural ecosystems support more than 7.5 billion humans. Whereas directly or indirectly human built environment affected humanity to greater extent and need care and regulation of varying degrees. It requires critical ‘green’ infrastructure for cities, serving to clean air and water, recycle nutrients, replenish biodiversity, fertilize and protect agriculture crops, and so on.

A central challenge of built environments is simply to cope with the complexity and mutability of elements and actors over time. A single residential building might be composed of 200 different materials, many of which are associated with specialized producers, installers, and repair and management technicians. If we like to predict impacts of decision-making on the performance of the built environment, then we must perceive built environment to be a system with a multitude of design, construction, operation, maintenance, and disposal processes relating flows of materials to decisions by different actors at different moments and places.

This system is the interface between culture and built environment. Due to the high complexity factor, any model of the built environment needs a way to describe which of the many subsystems are addressed, and a framework for decomposing the many physical elements. If a consistent framework is adopted, it might help to unify modelling activity. It should be possible to relate the mass and energy flows to the financial and information flows at each stage of design, planning, and management. 

The issues of built environment emerge from the imbalance of nature and economy of society. Over history, the issues of built environment begins with cultural context and boundary setting which has changed and with it changed the values of adopting a social–ecological framework. The 16th‐century sets the scenery for explicitly defining relations between the built environment and the ecosystem. Rising international commerce, the enlightenment, the constitution of national states, and the coming up of industrial revolution were all the factors that promised to transform both the material world and society.

The first significant attempt to apply a socio-ecological model in the built environment was in 1669 Paris. In order to make France economically self-sufficient the growth of industry increased through subsidies, tariff protection and with rigid regulated qualities and prices of manufactured and agricultural products, and initiation of a vigorous road-building program. Most significantly they made an ordinance to restrict the use of natural resources for sustainable management of forests through the principle of cutting in one year not more than the forest can produce in one year. 

Similarly for mining and forestry in 1713 the first book was published on sustainable management of forests. It is interesting to see how the birth of a ‘resource economy’, and the idea of enforcing sustainable rates of harvest, occur before the industrial revolution, and arise out of the intellectual framework of the enlightenment. It is, however, the 18th-century Industrial Revolution, and the consequent massive exploitation of nature through chemistry and mechanics, that focuses attention on resource constraints and the need for long-term balance of energy and material flows.

In the 19th century the scientific disciplines of thermodynamics and ecology appear in parallel and constitute until today the essential basis for understanding relations between the built environment and the ecosystem. Most visibly, this focus is also reflected in the 19th-century Romantic Movement, with its new perspective on the relation between society and nature. By the close of the 19^th century, the stage was set for operationalizing a model of the built environment as a complex social–ecological system.

Patrick Geddes (1854–1932), a biologist and first theorists of the emerging town planning movement, argued that one should immerse him/herself in the geography of the region before commencing urban planning. Hence, his famous dictum ‘Survey before Plan’ emerged. He studied how areas are unified by problems of their development and by their resource base, and that ‘It takes the whole region to make the city’. He explained that ‘a city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time’. 

In 1898 Ebenezer Howard proposed building ‘garden cities’ to alleviate the social ills of industrial cities and the declining population of the countryside. The new cities were to be carefully integrated into the surrounding landscape, ensuring workers and their families an access to rural amenities and green space, and allowing wastes to be sustainably recycled.

Howard's approach emphasized direct community action; the importance of practical civic infrastructure; the need for regional-scale growth management and the combination of environmental amenities with social justice. Garden cities represent a first modern attempt to integrate economic, social and ecological design, and constitute one of the most enduring and influential built environment concepts. 

The 19th century created the chemical, physical, ecological and economic basis to formulate a theory where urban regions and their built environments function as complex social–ecological systems.

At the turn of 20th‐century world was propelled through the wars and a massive industrialization and urbanization cycle, the discussion on built environments become exclusively focused on urban reconstruction and meeting the urgent need for housing and associated infrastructure. The wellspring of available energy released by the second Industrial Revolution created a modern world view, where problems of resource scarcity and pollution could always be resolved through additional energy and new technologies.

The colonization of nature is extended through a global trading system, sprawling cities and the industrial agriculture. The 19th-century perspective of a balanced, integrated system is no longer culturally significant and a kind of dualism emerged that separates natural and social sciences and obscures the system perspective.

In the first half of the 20th‐century, German landscape architect Leberecht Migge formulated and implemented the principles of urban metabolism in development projects of social housing for workers. 

The settlements developed in 1930s were based on detailed calculations of the necessary surface areas to cultivate food for the inhabitants. Each house had a garden just the right size, and was designed to achieve complete recycling of materials through composting of organic waste and the production of bio-solid fertilizer from sewage – a balanced socio-ecological metabolism for organics.

In late 1960s and early 1970s, with the environmental movement and the first oil crisis, the concept of system ecology and general system theory emerged to become the basis for more complex models of the interface between nature and economy to solve issues of built environment. 

The main discussion concerning the built environment in the second part of the 20th‐century is not the management of scarce resources, and even less so its relation to the ecosystem. The urban extension that is occurring within developed and undeveloped nations is still dominated by the idea that energy and materials are indefinitely available and that nature can be substituted in practically all its functions by new technologies.

The future problems were not seen as linked to the colonization of the ecosphere, but rather a possible colonization of outer space. The management response to the second and third Industrial Revolution becomes the central problem for built environments. Physical models for urban and regional planning are narrowly confined to transport engineering and construction management problems. 

In the 1970s the shock of the oil crises produced a debate on limits to growth and raised awareness about limited resources. This in turn gave birth to the new field of environmental economics, which emphasized questions like the value of nature, the importance of long-term constraints, and issues of generational equity. However, such questions were not really present in the debates on planning of built environment.

This economic view of an isolated social system that encompasses the built environment is still a common mind set within the building professions where nature does not exist outside of gardens and urban green spaces and thus its services carry no price or the impacts. 

During the era of globalized capitalism in the 20^th century the application of economic discounting to almost all types of environmental assets is also being witnessed. This is especially alarming when applied to ecological resources that must be sustained over the long-term, but is also of particular relevance to how the long-lived elements of the built environment, including buildings, infrastructure and systems of land use and open space, are perceived and valued. 

Rising concern over environmental impacts and resource scarcities has generated significant progress over the last ten to 15 years in methods for exploring the physical and economic relationships between the built environment, society and the ecosphere. Methods such as life-cycle analysis and material flow analysis, and stock aggregation methods have been standardized as a common framework and sorted through building information models (BIM).

The approach emerged from an ecological perspective of looking back in time at how different societies defined and managed the relationship between the built environments and their surrounding ecosystems. The ecological context of built environment have shaped the rise and fall of civilizations, wars, and human achievement. 

The capacity of built environment’s social and ecological system to survive and prosper may depend on its ability to understand past historical patterns of survival of societies and an explanation about how & why societies failed or succeeded. There are five factors that contribute to collapse of built environment i.e. climate change, hostile neighbors, trade partners, environmental problems, and a society's response to its environmental problems. 

Discussion on issues of built environment is currently focused on how to harmonize rates of consumption with constraints imposed by natural systems. All proposals for built environment design and management may need to first be assessed in terms of their effect on future threats and vulnerability. The challenge of achieving sustainable built environment is the scale of physical inter-dependencies that characterize cities and their systems in a complex global society. Urban regions can no longer be perceived as polygons on a road map. 

Cities everywhere are nodes connected by hierarchical, global networks upon which they depend for critical supplies including energy, food, information, consumer products, employment and even human reproduction.

The support systems for cities include elements of their ecological footprints – the productive and sometime remote areas of agriculture, forests and fisheries. Lack of foresight leads to ‘unnatural’ disasters and to domino effects. The rate and cost of urban disasters is increasing.

Poverty is a factor that often leads to crowding, poor construction and inadequate medical supplies. But such problems are compounded by the increasing size and complexity of the built environment, and by systems that are planned and designed without much attention to even the most likely changes. 

The future will almost certainly be punctuated by an increasing frequency and variety of city-based disasters and societal collapse. In a fast changing world that is home to over 1 million towns and cities, it is likely that many such fortresses will play out at different times and places. Economic, social and environmental threats are the ‘dark-side’ or shadow threats that lie behind visions of sustainability. Ecological perspectives offer a variety of strategies for achieving resilient sustainable development of built environments.

Reference:

1. The above article is directly copied and pasted from: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09613210801928131 (Retrieved 11/8/2018)