Architecture, civil engineering, and planning are the means by which we design our environments. The environments created are there to perform a function: aesthetic perhaps, but also, and chiefly, practical: the designed environments are there to facilitate some of our life activities. Inevitably, such designs entail compromises to manage costs, materials, pollutants and local norms and regulation. These compromises may mean not everyone benefits from the designs; some may even be hampered.

These designs, as much as they may enhance our lives, also control them. Roads in particular have strictly enforced norms governing behaviour. There is nothing in principle stopping you from driving the wrong way up a dual carriageway; from time to time people do (though rarely do they do so deliberately). However, they tend to gain little from the enterprise, even if they manage to avoid an accident or retribution from the law. Urban environments are also heavily controlled and monitored. Walls and barriers channel pedestrians; signs tell them to keep left, walk or don’t walk, to keep out, or that the mall closes at 10pm. The predominance of private property in urban environments further constrains freedom. Designed environments can be perfected with greater financial investment. Thus, the more money a society has to design its environments and to implement those designs, the more control it can exert over its individuals.

With control comes homogenization and loss of individuality. The environments are designed around the ‘average’ person: the more average you are, the more convenient you will find them. Everything from homes to shops to entertainment to workplaces become designed for the average person. As you deviate from the norm, you increasingly find the world is not for you. If the environment is selective, those at the extremes of the bell-curve will be eliminated or forced to move elsewhere.

Separately, globalization is leading to homogenization of environments, meaning that there are fewer and fewer ‘refuges’ for those who do not conform to the norm. If life is easier and more convenient in designed environments, then standard evolutionary theory would have us believe that this leads to an explosion of diversity in the population. But when society itself is part of that designed environment, norm enforcement acts to oppose this process. People are arrested for “looking suspicious” or “behaving suspiciously“.

Contrast rural environments. Though there are codes of behaviour (such as the ‘country code‘), the law is weighted more in favour of freedom of access (albeit sometimes to the chagrin of landowners). Even in farmland, ramblers enforce access rights where landowners try to close them off. Many humans, then, hold dear the idea of freedom to roam in natural (or at least, non-urban) environments, whilst cheerfully accepting considerable constraints on and monitoring of their behaviour in cities. Though the fact that farmland is a designed environment detracts from the argument somewhat, freedom is associated with non-designed environments, while control is associated with designed environments.

Nature may impose constraints on access in the wilderness. Marshes, rivers, mountain ranges, oceans, deserts, ice sheets, gullies, dense forest, even the weather – all impede progress if you have a particular destination in mind, or a curiosity to satisfy. All can prove dangerous or even deadly. However, these constraints reward the brave, the inventive, the creative. They encourage thought, ingenuity and intelligence. The cost may be death, but the rewards could be access to new territory and new food sources, new people to meet and trade with. Designed environments offer no incentives, no rewards for ‘breaking the rules’: they encourage only docility and compliance. What is to be gained from going up a ‘down’ escalator?

Of course, it is the aversion of risk that leads us to enhance our environments by designing them to make access easier. We now cross marshes daily at high-speed without worrying about falling ill, getting lost, or stuck in quicksand, thanks in part at least to the ingenuity of our ancestors who built railways, paths and roads across them. We have put bridges across the Firth of Forth, and tunnels under the Channel and through the Alps. Once our whole planet is designed and subjugated in this way, our descendants will be left only with the task of maintenance (itself part of the design); there will be little need for the creativity that created the routes in the first place.

The human race of the future risks being completely homogenized, domesticated and cowed all in the name of convenience. This hominid, which might be dubbed Homo suburbiensis, has no creativity, no individuality, no knowledge of how to survive other than by earning money to spend at the supermarket. The only ray of ‘hope’ is in ‘natural disasters’. A ‘natural disaster’ is an event not directly caused by humans such as an earthquake or a flood, albeit that the latter could be caused by poor catchment ‘management’ or unseasonably high rainfall as a result of climate change. A natural disaster is a disaster from the point of view of maintaining convenient lifestyles, as well as from the point of view of those immediately injured or killed by the occurrence. Either perspective is a purely human one, and I confess to a somewhat cynical suspicion that the former rather than the latter (for those who are not friends or relatives of the dead) is what chiefly merits the label of ‘disaster’ to an event. Life ceases to be easy, and suddenly becomes a day-to-day struggle to find food, clean water and shelter, while avoiding disease. Meteor strikes, hurricanes, supervolcano eruptions, tsunamis, coronal ejections, supernovas, gamma ray bursts, black holes — the universe has a number of weapons in its armoury that can cause greater damage in the short and long term than anything humans can achieve. Where these obliterate our infrastructure, the slate is wiped clean, and if we want to rebuild everything, we will have to design it again.

Disasters occur on various scales of course. The larger the scale, the more difficult the recovery. But the scale of a disaster is also somehow subjective with respect to human population density and interdependence. The more coastal towns there are, the more likely it is that one will get flooded. The more people live near volcanos, the more people will be killed by them. The more interconnected we are, the more remote an event has to be before it has a reduced potential to affect us. Designed environments create fragility and vulnerability. The easier they make life for humans, the more humans they can sustain (even if not sustainably), and so the more humans are affected when the designed environments fail. Worse, where designed environments replace an ecosystem that we once knew how to live in, so that knowledge is lost. Then, when the system fails, no-one knows how to survive in what remains. Designed environments create designed humans, dependent entirely on designed systems to support their existence.