Urban Ecology

Urban ecology is the study of the urban ecosystem as an ecological unit that is part of the larger global ecosystem; it is also known as the ecology of cities and towns. Urban ecology examines the relationships between the urban and natural systems and interactions among the biotic components—including humans. It also involves the study of the urban ecosystem's impact on other ecosystems, seeking to understand relationships with the rural system, particularly transfers of matter and energy and the complementary functions the surrounding space provides. The relationship with the global system derives from the contribution of the city to global environmental change and the use of renewable and nonrenewable natural resources.

As an interdisciplinary field of study, there is a debate among fields regarding an identifiable specific approach. Ecology understands urban ecology as a subfield of the discipline that studies the ecological relations in the unique human-modified environment, adopting a traditional approach and applying conventional theories, or with the perspective of integrating the human system and humans as another species. From this point of view, we can examine the budget of matter and energy flowing through the urban ecosystem and observe a unit that almost wholly depends on external sources of system inputs—food, fuel, water, and building materials—a heterotrophic ecosystem that does have parallel on earth. The outputs—solid waste, wastewater, combustion gases, and heat—are the results of industrial respiration, which is a metabolic process of what resembles a large living organism. The system inputs have varied distant origins while the outputs have varied destinations, thus the city depends on areas much larger than its own surface. This is the ecological footprint, the equivalent area of land required to support the provision of inputs and process the outputs. It measures the dependence of the city on other ecosystems and its sustainability; the more area required the more unsustainable the city.

Sociology and anthropology understand urban ecology as a division of human ecology, the study of how humans relate to their environment. The concept has a sociological origin in the Chicago School of Sociology of the 1920s. Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burguess conceived the human ecology approach to explain the urban development and spatial segregation within the city of Chicago as the result of the intervention of social and economic forces. Cities were regarded in their theory as environments governed by competition and accommodation forces, inspired by ecology and the ecological factors intervening in a natural ecosystem. From this point of view, groups compete for a scarce resource—the land—and this struggle leads to the division of the urban space into areas with homogeneous social and economic characteristics and to the appropriation of the most valuable areas by the higher rent groups. Naturalist Edward O. Wilson developed the notion of biophilia to define the nongenetic emotional affiliation of human beings to nature and other life forms for having lived within a biological world. This helps to understand the preference for living close to nature, moving to the suburbs, valuing natural landscapes, and ultimately, supporting conservation of ecosystems and species and desiring to manage them efficiently. Biophilia can be promoted by education and experience with wildlife or discouraged by living within a completely industrial environment.

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