ABSTRACT

The physical forms that shape the urban environment are produced by largely static elements – landscape, infrastructure and buildings. The common perception of this environment is that it is basically stable, largely unchanging and overwhelmingly continuous. But this is untrue. Important and profound changes continually take place in both the way that people engage with the environment that they inhabit and, as a result of their demands, the physical form it takes. Human beings are moving, changing, acting and reacting creatures that demand adaptability in everything they do. Even difficult to change things must be changeable – houses altered, highways rebuilt, skyscrapers demolished and replaced. Civilisation has an in-built proclivity for change and though this has always been a condition of human existence, it would seem that in contemporary life ever-increasing levels of complexity in the economy, society and technology have accentuated this natural condition.