Built environment

The spaces that human design and actions have shaped. These include infrastructural systems like electricity grids or highway networks, cities, buildings and other structures, landscaped areas, and resource-extraction sites like mines or oil wells. The ways in which these spaces are designed impact our social, cultural, and physical interactions with them. This term came to prominence in the United States and Europe in the 1960s, as the study of relationships between organisms and environments expanded beyond the ecological sciences into such disciplines as anthropology, psychology, urban planning, and architectural design.