SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The built environment can be defined as the combination of built structures and modified landscapes that support human life and livelihoods. It is made and continually remade and expanded through a dynamic mix of social interaction, competition, design and planning, physical labour, skilled craftsmanship, economic exchange, and cultural processes of place-making and meaning-making in the world. For all of these reasons, study of the built environment – for a long time the preserve of other disciplines – has become increasingly central to the concerns of many anthropologists. This entry reviews the history of anthropological neglect of and approaches to space, place, and architecture, and considers in turn the emergence of urban anthropology, the relation between space and power, the study of house, home, and homelessness, and phenomenological approaches to place before concluding with a discussion of heritage sites and constructions sites as fertile ground for future anthropological inquiry.