Sociology, Art, Culture and their Relationship with the Built Environment


1.3. Sociology, Art, Culture and their Relationship with the Built Environment:

Sociology means interaction of people to make a family unit, social group, community and society. Sociology is the study of the development, structure, and functioning of human society or the study of social problems.[i] 

Art means skills that a social group acquire to create artefacts and then appreciate the work of art in the form of paintings, sculpture, music, dance, clothes, literature, and architecture etc. Art is the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.[ii] 

Culture is the outcome of collective knowledge & wisdom passed from one generation to another. Culture is the ideas, customs, and social behavior of a particular people or society. Culture is the way of life of a group of people including their behaviors, beliefs, values, and symbols that they accept, generally without thinking about them it is passed along by communication and imitation from one generation to the next.[iii] 

Built environment means man-made environment that is generated by a social group with their art and culture. The built environment consists of all human-made structures and stands in contrast to the natural environment.[iv] Therefore as refined the art, culture and sociology of a human society as refined will be their built environment. Thus, the relationship between built environment and art, culture, and sociology is directly proportionate.


The character of the built environment has historically reflected the nature of prevailing human activity and industry, evolving over time with advances in technology, trade, and transportation. From the industrial age onward, societies around the globe have witnessed unparalleled growth in the number of building developments and the array of materials used to construct buildings. The concept of built environment stands in contrast to what is understood as the natural environment and consists of all manner of structures erected by humans, including but not limited to residential, commercial, industrial, educational, civic, and devotional buildings.[v] 

The physical dimension of the built environment and the living processes by which that environment is built together constitute a rich data field revealing insights about human behavior, social psychology, production and consumption patterns, and dispositions with regard to humans' relationship to or place within the natural world.


Examined macroscopically and historically, the diversity and evolution of our built environments can be probed for underlying social mechanisms and ideologies, for convergences and anomalies. Microscopically, in the design, construction, and use of just one building in the context of a sociopolitical community, we can observe a dynamism of interaction between aspects such as agency, participation, power, culture, space claiming, capital interests, social reproduction, policy, experience, and physical and psycho-social health. And while sociological exploration of the built environment produces a diverse array of claims, one fundamental finding is key: that we humans both shape and are shaped by the physical environment we build. Looking broadly at Humans’ 100,000-year tenure on Earth, one can imagine that during most of that history, humans impacted Earth in very natural ways, much like other hunting-gathering animals: producing and consuming only what was crucial to survival, dispersing waste across regions, and accumulating very few material goods.

A hunter-gatherer's relationship to the environment was, like that of modern-day humans, a paradoxical one. On one hand, nature's bounty was needed for survival; on the other hand, nature's unforgiving hazards jeopardized existence or diminished quality of life. In the absence of naturally occurring shelter such as a cave, the construction of reliable shelter was most likely a very important development in the progress of certain groups, allowing them proximity to natural resources yet decreasing their exposure to harmful elements.

And while this primitive "built environment" reduced nature's potentially negative effect on humans, it likely made an insignificant impact on the natural environment. It is believed that about 10,000 years ago—about ten percent of humans' total evolutionary history—there occurred a decisive shift away from nomadic behavior and toward a more fixed or settled standard of living. With the spread of agricultural knowledge and the refinement of tool technology, full-time farming became a viable option for survival. Accordingly, the character and composition of the built environment at that time likely evolved to suit a more settled lifestyle. The gathering together of more permanent buildings, including shelters and occupational buildings for storing and Processing, constituted what might be considered early cities. Settlements allowed an increase in the production and exchange of material goods and led to the creation of a more persistent waste stream within a limited land area.

While it is clear that civilizations since and before the dawning of the agricultural age have contributed to our species' progress in the form of technological advancement, amassed empirical knowledge, and increased mobility, it is interesting to note that until the relatively recent boom of industry and manufacturing, the technique employed in the construction of the built environment remained remarkably unchanged from the vernacular form, whereby building materials native to a given region were used and building expertise was passed from person to person over generations.

The unparalleled technological advancement witnessed in the late 19th and 20th centuries has left its indelible mark on the shape and content of the built environment. Industry, mining, and manufacturing made reliable the production of materials such as steel, increased access to resources such as fossil-fuel energy, increased the rate of production and assembly of goods, and vastly improved the methods of transporting such goods. This technological surge is made manifest in the growth of new architectural forms and in modified land-use plans. Cities have risen to unparalleled heights, and thanks to a growing transportation infrastructure, the suburbs have pushed the outer limits of urban development.

Therefore, we also must know what buildings and built environment means to different people with various social, artistic, and cultural background. Buildings are more than bricks and mortar; concrete and cement block; they are the physical manifestation of a plan involving multiple agents, motives, and desired outcomes depending on one's relationship to the building project, the building plan can be interpreted in many different ways by each person in its affiliation. A plan is many things, depending upon how one looks at it. From the point of view of society as a whole, a plan is an instrument of policy, a means of facilitating a certain line of action.
  
Thus, the plan of a city, or entire metropolitan area, or region, may be regarded as an instrument of socioeconomic policy for the production and exchange of goods and ideas from the standpoint of the architect or physical planner, however, a plan is a representation of a horizontal plane passed through a building, city or community. In this sense, a plan is a solution for a given line of action. It inevitably reflects the designer's concept of how—within the limits given—a certain amount of space may be best organized for the specific operation to be housed.

For the people who live or work in the completed building or city, a plan is something else again. It is the schema of a control mechanism that, to a large extent, determines how happily they live or how well they work together. Thus, there exist diverse perspectives, including political, operational, and critical, in the planning and design of just one single building. When we consider the built environment, therefore, we must recognize this multiplicity of points of view and be aware of the web of forces that shape our physical environment. Put plainly, a building project means one thing to a venture capitalist or lending institution, another thing to an architect or engineer, and yet another thing to an end user, dweller, neighbor, historian, etc.


References:

[i] From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology (Retrieved 11/8/2018)
[ii] From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art (Retrieved 11/8/2018)
[iii] From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture (Retrieved 11/8/2018)
[iv] From: https://www.enotes.com/research-starters/sociology-built-environment (Retrieved 11/8/2018)
[v] From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Built_environment (Retrieved 11/8/2018)

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