Built Environment

Built Environment

The built environment refers to human-made surroundings, typically used in architecture, urban planning, public health, sociology, and anthropology.

The built environment encompasses spaces crafted by human efforts, such as cities, buildings, infrastructure like electricity grids and highways, landscaped areas, and resource extraction sites like mines and oil wells. How these spaces are planned and organised influences our social, cultural, and physical interactions with them. This concept gained prominence in the 1960s in the United States and Europe as it expanded from ecological sciences to fields like anthropology, psychology, urban planning, and architectural design, exploring the connections between organisms and their surroundings.


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Parra's studio, with Parra at the centre, his back to the camera as he works on the large painting takes centre stage, showing a faceless blue woman in a striped dress, painted in red, purple, blue and teal. The studio is full of brightly coloured paints, with a large window on the right and a patterned rug across the floor under the painting.