There is a firm belief that the built environment and its relationships affect and assist in molding human relationships. It is important to note that human relationships are reflective of cultural patterns. The manner, quality, depth, and degree of human relationships are in part molded by cultural background. Our living environment, including the man-made environment, helps shape that cultural background. In this context, language, rituals, literature, food, music, and art are not culture, they are images of a culture, but not culture in themselves.
Culture is defined as a set of values and lifestyles which have a distinctive nature and history.
Street layouts are often gridded and always uniform at least in width. The roadways are engineered in a way that usually has no relationship to the natural topography or any other site considerations except perhaps viewscapes. What this implies is that housing developments are designed to dominate nature, or at least for the few, visually conquer the natural landscape. The uniformity of roads is designed with the maximum amount of efficiency in mind. Perfectly perpendicular lines, right angles, consistency, and uniformity are rules that are held high.