Social Impact Of Architecture

1.0 Introduction

The profession of architecture refers to the rendering of services associated with design and construction of buildings and their environments. Such services include, but are not limited to consultation, evaluation, planning, provision of preliminary studies, designs, construction documents, construction management, and the administration of construction contracts.

Though architecture is seen to play only a small part of human lives, when the society is considered at large, it becomes very useful for human needs such as shelter, social function, technology, art, economics, politics, science and more . According to Adam (2008), this explains why architecture can be viewed as a mirror to society. For this purpose, architects

However, he strongly believes that most people hardly realize the significance of city planning and construction on social and economic development . The way buildings and neighbourhoods are designed coupled with how their surrounding spaces are built and utilized may have larger consequences on the community and the people.

A discussion on the social impact of architecture cannot be more topical because in today’s world, majority of the people live in cities. Thus, in building and construction, it is now very crucial for engineers to create an avenue to accommodate this influx of people. In Ghana for example, cities like Accra and Kumasi have undisputedly become the centre of human activity and civilization. It is best that the Government of Ghana has initiated projects in other locations such as the establishment of the University of Natural Resources in Sunyani to ease the influx and pressure on the highly populated and dense cities. These on-going projects will help in decentralising activities across different locations within the

It remains one of the major economic growth areas in every developing country such as Ghana. Even now, one in eight employed in the private sector works within the experience economy, accounting for approximately 5.3% of GDP (Kretzschmar, 2003) .

It has become evident that vision and character is seen as a very important facet of an architecture design (Carmona et al, 2002) . Carmona et al (2002) sees “character promotion in townscape and landscape by responding to and reinforcing locally distinctive patterns of development and culture” as the first principles of urban design. The following examples illustrate how buildings and places have contributed to economic