What is the Built Environment?

The term ‘built environment’, or ‘built world’, refers to the human-made surroundings that provide the setting for human activity, ranging in scale from buildings to parks. It has been defined as “the human-made space in which people live, work, and recreate on a day-to-day basis.”

You may be surprised to learn that this definition does not come from the building industry, rather it stems from social science. Similarly, for infrastructure it is not about roads or bridges as much as it is about how a dam provides water supply or how a bridge allows access to the other side. It is about how we interact with and experience the built environment. To use transportation infrastructure as an example, it is the roads, bridges, traffic lights, bike lanes, sidewalks, buses and trains that define “my commute to work” – choices of transport, duration of my journey, how productive or relaxed I am along the way, travelling safely and arriving on-time.

The Built Environment is all about how we experience the buildings and spaces that we inhabit together with the infrastructure we use and rely upon. It is the confluence of urban design, architecture, engineering, psychology, sociology, sustainability, resilience and technology. The built environment is supported by interacting systems that need to be managed and optimized including transportation, waste disposal, safety, security, health care, emergency services, clean water, connectivity, communications and access to a reliable and ideally, a renewable energy grid.