Lecture 17 – Social Structural Approaches to Environmental Change

Viewing human environments as sociophysical systems means that the qualities of our environments and their impacts on behavior and health can be changed by altering their physical or social structures. Illustrative cases in which specific architectural or social features of behavior settings were modified to improve occupants’ emotional and physical well-being are presented. The proliferation of virtual behavior settings in recent years poses new challenges for maintaining complementarity (and avoiding conflict) between virtual communities and the place-based environments from which they are accessed via computer or mobile device. Finally, strategies for combining a community’s material assets (e.g., its economic, natural, technological capital) and its human resources (e.g., social, human, moral capital) to improve population health are discussed.