I think to answer a lot of the issue you’ve discussed, and questions you’ve asked in this article, you need to study the behavioral psychology of how people interact with environment. You can’t anywhere unless you understand what drives human behavior I started to get into this field about 5 years ago and it’s made the pieces fit into place. There are several good academic journals such as the Journal of Environmental Psychology. I do some interviews on it on my podcast https://medium.com/how-to-save-the-world-by-katie-patrick/tagged/podcast