The Environmental Adaptation of Human Lifestyle

Human beings are constantly interacting with their surrounding environment. This interaction tends to adapt the surrounding environment to human inner context (culture) and eliminate undesirable environmental tensions. As an important and specific component of culture, ‘Lifestyle’ plays an important role in human and environmental adaptation. “Lifestyle” has number of manifest and hidden aspects that influence the built environment and constantly change it. Based on the concept of “affordance” and “meaning”, this study describes the “human and environment adaptation” through the analysis of Qashqai dwellings. The theoretical framework of this study is based on ‘Environmental adaptation to human lifestyle’. The adaptation of human and environment happens under the influence of values, human mental meanings and affordances. In order to study human and environmental adaptation aspects, the structure of the built and natural environment, the structure of lifestyle, and finally the structure of meanings have been analyzed. Human and environment adaptation is a creative issue, with affordance-meaning continuous adaptation as its central component. Changes in the Built environment are reflections of the continuous evaluation and adaptation of affordance-meaning. The findings, in addition to providing a theoretical structure for studies of man-environment relation and introducing human and environmental adaptation properties, help to understand why people form their environments and dwellings in a particular fashion.