Trumpeter (1993)
ISSN: 0832-6193
Cultural Issues and the Human-Made Enviroment
Professor Kiyo Izumi is retired from the School of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Waterloo in Ontario.
"More serious than "despiritualization of nature," although perhaps related to it, is the fact of unavailability of non-superficial human relationships, and disinvolvement with significant others in modern urban life."1
Cities, the largest of human-made environments, have historically always assumed a dominant role in cultural issues. Each city of the past embodied a unique local culture, reflected in many ways. Physically, this uniqueness is seen in the architecture and street patterns of cities which have been preserved and maintained; archeological excavations also revealed it in those that have perished. As specialization developed and facilitated commerce, and thus a more interdependent world began to evolve, this uniqueness began to exhibit a similarity of environmental designs. More recently, to accommodate an accelerating population increase, entire new cities are built, and old cities are rebuilt and major additions made. These reveal the universal appeal of the logic and results of science, technology, industrialization and the accompanying economic rationale for planning these environments. The physical distinctiveness reflecting any unique culture is now increasingly subsumed, as a certain universality of urban form becomes pervasive throughout the world.
Among the more easily perceived similarities are the means of transportation, mass and individual, in which the ubiquitous private automobile begins to dominate by its peculiar universal appeal and the inordinate amount and types of space allocated for its use, a major factor in dictating urban landscape. Mass production and related machine techniques in construction and servicing also dictate a multitude of designs of man-made environments from street lighting to the undistinguished high-rise. In any art there is unlimited potential for creative differences, even within a medium. But it is evident that the culture of science, technology, and industrialization is becoming universal in its sameness in our man-made environments throughout the world. 2
More important to this discussion is the fact that urbanization brings together ever greater numbers of diverse peoples of a region, in increasingly intimate proximity, in one place and time. Coupled with rapid transportation and the growth of the electronic media, urbanization also permits other peoples, not only from the hinterland but also from remote corners of the entire world, to interact more directly with the larger numbers of people in our cities. Since many significant cultural and other differences in ourselves, and between ourselves, and others, are more clearly revealed when we are closer together (though closeness does not necessarily lead to greater understanding), urbanization may be the singularly significant process that affects culture.
The development and application of science and technology, and their many accompanying socioeconomic rationales and procedures for the planning of human-made environments, in themselves reflect profound cultural changes in attitudes and values in the countries in which these originated and in those that adopt or adapt them. In some instances, the effects are not only dramatic but may also be traumatic - as, for example, the situation of the "untouchables" in the building of the city of Chandigarh in India. The installation of water-borne sewage disposal system (an application of a scientifically based technology) in this city made a whole class of people, in effect, dispensable. This outcome, through the application of a technology that requires an inordinate amount of water in a water-short environment, raises fundamental questions. In spite of the admittedly humane notion of preventing disease, in this instance, such planning decisions now need to be examined in the context of a more inclusive (ecological) concept of health. 3
The list of effects of such forms of human-made environments for good or bad, in terms of a more inclusive cultural context, has yet to be compiled, as the limited rationality of fiscal economic assessment continues to prevail. 4 Besides, such an evaluative appreciation requires comprehension of the more complex issue of the form of global culture and model of humans that is crucial to his survival in terms of the more universal issues of humans and/as their environment. Urbanization may provide a significant arena for this examination: the essential proximity of a diversity of people in a city should help clarify cultural differences and issues and, it is hoped, lead to greater tolerance, if not understanding.
Hence it is important that we begin to understand not only the forces that bring people together through urbanization, but also, and equally important, how people are brought together and arranged in space and time in these human-made environments which are slowly becoming uniformally similar throughout the world. In this paper I will address the more space-and-time-bound intimate cultural issues. These are the more personal and invisible cultural ways which, at the behavioral level, develop through prolonged uninterrupted interaction among a people, through several generations, in a familiar and seemingly unchanging and stable environment where there is meaningful spontaneous intercourse.
The tentative evidence in those cities/countries where the culture of science, technology, and industrialization now dominate is that the new human-made environments are increasingly inhibitive, and even prohibitive, of such spontaneous human relationships. This is the consequence of a belief in the efficacy of specialization - which, it is believed, can be applied anywhere, anytime, to anything - coupled with exclusive (and divisive) concepts of economies of scale and administrative efficiency. This tendency to specialize is, of course, as old as human awareness of differences from others, and it undoubtedly played an important part in bringing people together in the first place. However, the scope of the application of specialization today knows no boundaries: as it occurs in urbanization it is the result of the extensive and intensive application of science, technology, industrialization and their accompanying socioeconomic techniques, which in themselves are the results of specialization.
One can appreciate the division of roles and responsibilities based on differences in competence and skills, and the application of these in special places and time. But eve today, many of these specializations can obtain only in an environment that has the qualities and characteristics essential to the application of the specific skills and competencies. Many of these are basic to the means of life - such as food production, where the farmer's skill and competence are best used on land that is suited to the growing of food. Many skills and competencies intrinsic to industrialization are applied in special environments, designed and built for these purposes, located conveniently for industry's own complex reasons, and made possible by the potential of the techniques of transportation, energy distribution, and communication.
Here we discover an ironic paradox, which illustrates the divisive and exclusive notions of economies of scale if they are applied independently to each separate enterprise. Presumably, the combined potential of the distribution networks of communication, energy, and transportation could free humankind from space and time so that, except for a few, none of us would have to live at a particular place and time to assure subsistence, and that more of us could live where and with whom we like in our individual search for the meaning of life. 5 But each of these networks (along with other enterprises), bent on independent economic efficacies, demand larger concentrations of people and thus create inefficiencies in the other enterprises, through a space-time distribution of people, things and places, to maximize a greater consumption of each. 6
In the new human-made environments of our cities it is not only similar major activities, functions, and related means to provide the basics of living that are segregated in increasingly larger concentrations. We also see agglomerations of places for play, relaxation, learning, healing, etc., in the name of administrative and economic efficiencies of utilities, services, and personnel, the latter considered as merely dehumanized components of a system. The many cost-benefit studies to validate these concentrations on the basis of economies of scale consider the cost incurred by the individual as external. The cumulative costs to individuals are then considered as maximizing the income of the various other enterprises. These enterprises deliberately separate people's places of work, play, learning, healing, marketing, etc., to which they must have access, from their homes, to necessitate more frequent use of their respective services.
As a consequence, the way in which we build our urban areas today is, collectively, the single most wasteful use of irreplaceable land, irrecoverable time and other resources, and is the major direct and indirect cause of pollution and environmental damage.
But the degree of specialization does not stop simply in terms of activities and functions and the special environments for them. Any differentiation of humans is now the basis for deciding on the use and occupancy of cities. In more "advanced" urban planning and designs, any classification of people (presumably derived for the purpose of understanding humans), not only a social group such as the family, is assumed to be legitimate in deciding who lives where, under what conditions, with whom, for how long, and when. The list of human identifications includes not only those differences in age, sex, and birthplace, over which none of us have control. It also includes any attribute, acquired accidentally or imposed - such as widow, widower, divorcee, single, married, single-parent, student, unwed mother, childless couple, parentless child, retired, semi-retired, welfare recipient, unrelated, and so on, ad infinitum. It is assumed that these singular identifications represent or embody the totality of the person so designated, usually based on the application of some "scientifically" approved methodology of quantitative analysis and statistical probability.
The cumulative effect of all this is an excessive differentiation of space, with ever larger concentrations of things and people, each for a specific purpose, function, and activity, and also for individual social relationships, behaviour and states of being. It is not only the computed but also the imputed economic and administrative efficiencies that are at work here, as we proceed further to differentiate characteristics and qualities of concepts such as health (disease, illness, sick and dying roles, etc.) and leisure (play, recreation, meditation, contemplation), based on arbitrarily established criteria for the quantitative comparative measuring of subjective qualitative experiences. No form of human differentiation that our semantic imagination can conceive is now safe from being used as a basis for deciding use and occupancy of space in the new human-made environments. Even the meaning of life is a subject for scientific analysis for political, legal, economic, and other social evaluations in the name of a variety of fragmented concepts of efficiency.
This precise correlation of classifications of people to behavior, activities, purposes, etc., and to space and time, is the basis for the new human-made environments. The burgeoning "science" of the study of human-environment relationships, - which is variously known as architectural and environmental sciences and is coupled with a variety of established social sciences and related disciplines such as psychology, sociology and anthropology, of which a large component is aggregated as environmental design research - is now a major force in shaping the culture of human-made environments as seen in urbanization. 7
The human consequences are that more of us spend more time being transported from place to place, faced with meeting and dealing with more and more strangers, even antagonists, in unfamiliar and even hostile environments. We spend more time trying to be spontaneous as we are required to schedule our time more precisely, more frequently, and further into the future. We are left little time for those "non-superficial human relationships" and "involvement with significant others," to participate in that essential profusion of seemingly purposeless but meaningful encounters.
In such human-made environments, cultural differences at the day-to-day experiential level are difficult to nurture and sustain. The pressures to conform, to synchronize with urban space and time at every level of one's personal life, leave little time and opportunity to cultivate individual and group uniqueness. The sheer physical proximity of diverse people, who only share some administratively imposed identity in ever higher densities, does not permit those more overt social relationships, behaviors and activities that are intrinsic to significant cultural differences. This same proximity has, through experience, made necessary a variety of rules and regulations in our cities. Any involvement or intrusion may bring to bear legal sanctions, liabilities and accountabilities, which not only inhibit but often prohibit many forms of group and individual expressions and displays of unique cultural traits and modes of behavior.
Since it becomes increasingly difficult to behave in culturally different ways at the non-verbal level, people begin to turn to more symbolic means to assert these differences. Some of these, such as language, exclude the participation of others and simply drive in the wedge further between different people. Basic to the understanding and sharing of differences beyond the non-verbal level is the need for a common means of communication, recognizing that to more completely understand another culture one must know its language.
I have discussed what I perceive to be some dominating negative consequences of our human-made environments in cultural considerations at the behavioral level. I have suggested that these are the results of the (mis) application of science, technology, industrialization and the derivative social techniques, particularly in the identification of people for the use and occupancy of human-made space. As experience shows, when peoples of different cultures are together in the same space and time, under the conditions discussed, more often than not the result is conflict.
Hence, a major planning issue, and therefore a cultural one, is the question of how we should identify, symbolize, classify, or conceive of humans for the design of human-made environments and the related social decision-making. Further, what are those spatial characteristics and relationships, the arrangement of people, physically in space and time, that will permit the essential condition of being "a part and yet apart," to develop a cultural community that respects differences and permits the unfolding of the potential of each - all this in the context of a growing urban population, and of shortages and limits of all varieties of material resources. To address all of these we will need to consider the ecology of knowledge, for which I offer the following considerations:
An Ecology of Knowledge
- that knowledge is the most unlimited, unorganized and uncontrollable production of the human mind,
- that each of us do not and cannot know all that is known and that our respective pool of knowledge is unique to each of us,
- that reality in a communicable, that is, universalizable sense, is a semantic construction of shared knowledge that we collectively consider pertinent,
- that this semantic construction, including ourselves as the environment, is the only environmental reality with which we can deal collectively,
- that the environmental ethical problem is the reconciling of essentially two kinds of knowledge: discovered knowledge, mainly from science and the related ways of observing and perceiving, and created knowledge for evaluative purposes, deriving from the creative process as evidenced in religions, ideologies, arts and the like and the so-called humanities, and
- that context is some combination of the above, and that in the case of the future it is still a more arbitrary extrapolation to some lesser or greater degree of our present knowledge of what is and what was.
I began with a quote, a statement by Dr. Shashi Pande, a psychiatrist, who brings together the wisdom and philosophy of India, the humanities and psychology of Europe, the neuro sciences of America, melded with his own humanness, as the theme for my discussion.
Let me end with another quote, to respectfully suggest yet another cultural frame of reference for your questions, and, I hope, answers to mine. It is a translation of some Japanese Haiku which reads,
"Everything is symbolic, everything is holy. There is no special time or place or person, privileged to represent the rest. And then democracy can begin. The many are made one when the totality is in every part. When one thing is taken up, all things are taken up with it. One flower is the spring. It is there all the time."8
Footnotes and References
1. Shashi K. Pande, "From Hurried Habitability to Heightened Habitability," Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic, The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Position paper prepared for the First National Symposium on Habitability, Los Angeles, California, May 11-14, 1970.
2. As one world traveller has told me, he is amazed at the monotony arising from the uniformity within the dissimilarities of environments, from one country to another, wherever technology and industrialization have touched the places he has visited. It is not simply the ubiquitous Coca Cola signs or the Hilton Hotels. He has been most affected by total perceptual effects of the various parts of the cities, particularly the new residential areas, regardless of flora, terrain, climate, and other basic environmental differences.
3. In Japan, when there was an all-pervasive immediate environmental relationship between villages, towns, and even cities, with the ubiquitous vegetable gardens, "night soil" to the "last drop" was gathered and used as fertilizer. As modern sewer systems were installed, in the name of health, these immediate sources of fresh food began to cost more and quality declined; in some cases fresh food even became scarce. In addition, there were many adjustments that many people who depended on such agricultural economics had to make. While it may be shown that some disease and illness were caused by the above type of agricultural technique, the evidence is that this was caused mostly through carelessness. As some observant people have stated, Japan has substituted smog, mercury poisoning, and the pollution of the seas around it.
4. A beginning analysis of the impact of technology on society has been made, but this is still in terms of specific projects and limited themes. However, some of these are insightful and significant. I cite only three. See, Technology and Social Change, eds, H. Russell Bernard and Pertti Pelto, The MacMillan Company, 1972; People in the Way, by James W. Wilson, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1973, and "The Pernicious Effects of Development," by George N. Appell, in Fields within Fields within Fields, The World Institute Council, New York.
5. The economics of telecommunications is a paradox in social terms. For example, telephone services were not available until people were concentrated together in close physical proximity. When telephone services were provided, it was found that close to 100 per cent of the calls were within the concentrated area. This is not to deny the validity of such an amenity for a variety of purposes, such as for commerce, and to ameliorate the situation of disabled people. But there is no denying that many people who are close together physically become separated when provided with telephones.
6. For example, the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) has stated that if its system is to become economically viable, Toronto should be planned so there are greater concentrations of specialized functions at the "nodal" points - meaning stop stations spaced in terms of economic cost of passenger distance calculated on the basis of fuel costs, speed, and time - so that the maximum numbers of the people can be transported at minimum cost to the enterprise. The users' economic costs, time, and social costs are, of course, externalities.
7. It is interesting to note a statement, in the introduction to a study, which says, "It is the avowed intention of human ecology, and this journal, to become increasingly scientific and develop more conclusive evidence on the relations between health and well-being and major environmental and related population characteristic factors," and in the summary, "prospectively collected effect parameters of health, happiness, and housing preferences could be subjected in Tapiola to uniquely well-controlled factorial analysis with regard to single actions and interactions of income, educational, occupational, and social class; internal (housing unit) population density; housing type; and past community and housing experience - factors which vary widely and largely independently and at `fine grain' through the town." from, "Tapiola: A Unique Experimental Design Separating Socioeconomic Class from Housing and Community Environmental Factors in Health and Well-being. A Methodological Note," by M. Lawrence Heideman Jr., in Urban Ecology , Vol. 2, no. 1, May, 1976, Elseviar Scientific Publishing Company.
8. C.F. Blythe, Haiku, I viii. See also Norman O. Brown, Love's Body , Random House, 1966, p. 239.
Selected Bibliography
*Esser, A.H., ed., Behavior and Environment: The Use of Space by Animals and Men.. New York: Plenum, 1971.
*Hall, Edward T., Hidden Dimensions. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1966.
*Hall, Edward T., Beyond Culture. Garden City, New York: Anchor Press, Doubleday, 1977.
*Izumi, K., "The (in)human(e) environment." Transcript of 6 TV lectures. Ottawa: Ministry of State for Urban Affairs, Document C. 73.3.
*Izumi, K., "Environment and Behavior, Environmental Planning/Design Research," in Housing and People, Ottawa: The Canadian Council on Social Development, Vol. 6, no. 1, Spring 1975.
*Michelson, W., Man and His Urban Environment: A Sociological Approach. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1970.
*Rapoport, Anatol, Conflict In Man-made Environments. Penguin, 1974.
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