ABSTRACT
Environmental design concerns the total environment and how it is used, and it can include architecture, town planning, urban geography, urban conservation, transport and civil engineering, technology, landscape gardening and agriculture, as well as social, economic and political history. If environmental design and its history are subsumed under the titles of numerous other disciplines, should we then leave it at that, or is there a case for studying it in its own right? One of the reasons why I think that the subject deserves discussion in a handbook such as this is that it is, as its name implies, all around us, and affects us all in many different and complex ways. Although the history of environmental design can include all the areas listed above, it is significantly different from the history of, say, town planning or architecture. Indeed in the context of the urban environment, it would almost be true to say that the subject is concerned with all those aspects of the environment that have not been claimed by the town planners, or the architects, as well as those that have.
