Urban Ecology

Early Developments

Early urban ecological exploration and explanation in the mid 20th century reflected contemporary ecological thinking and theory involving the supposed linearity and directionality of ecological change (or succession) and the relative stability, efficiency, and coherence of ecological structure and organization. To this end, early academic interest in the effects of urban industrial growth on natural environments and ecological processes emphasized the degrading character of cities, with urban form and function critiqued and characterized as anathema to the form and function of “healthy” environmental systems. Industrial pollution, human waste, landscape fragmentation, and the growing and spatially concentrated demand for natural resources by industry and urban consumers were—and to a large degree still are—implicated in declines of air, water, and soil quality at local and regional scales, with broad environmental, social, and economic implications. Similarly, the replacement of native local and regional fauna and flora with nonnative, or invasive, species of plants and animals was implicated in the overall and generalized diminishment of urban landscapes, where local and regional biodiversities were being replaced by more homogeneous, weed-based ecological communities.

Because “nature” was, from this perspective, abolished by the city, then—by implication—its study, in the form of ecology, was antiurban, both in theory and in practice. The nonurban, or rural, remained the principal domain of “true” nature and, thus, of ecological inquiry throughout most of the 20th century. The implications for subsequent constructions of and distinctions between urban and rural—that is, the city (and urban society) as degrading and degraded and the hinterland (and rural society) as a more ecologically uncontaminated place—have been the topic of sustained critique and debate.

The Role of Human Ecology

By the late 20th century, urban ecology had emerged as a key object of explanation and academic inquiry among an interdisciplinary population of, principally, North American scholars. Equipped with a new set of ecological principles and concepts, and integrated theories of human-environment interaction, these human ecologists—ecologists, anthropologists, sociologists, and resource managers, many trained in rural or developing regions of the world—brought to the study of urban ecology a more sophisticated and nuanced appreciation of human-environment relationships in cities, whereby urban society and urban environments were understood as coregulated and codependent systems whose [Page 2926]interaction was nondeterministic, dialectical, and involving dynamics of feedback and change along multiple axes and gradients, from the purely physical to the socioeconomic. Anthropogenic environmental change, it was theorized, resulted in new sets of material and spatial conditions to which urban society responded and adjusted, which, in turn, resulted in further environmental change, future adjustments, and so forth.

This new systems approach of urban human ecology (not to be confused with the Chicago School of Human Ecology, developed in the 1920s, which focused on social and cultural relations within cities) replaced the ecological principles of balance, linearity, and stability (i.e., those concepts that fed accusations of environmental degradation) of earlier critiques with new models emphasizing the impacts of change, nonlinearity, and chaos on ecological structure, form, and function. The result was a new emphasis on the humanized urban ecosystem, one in which urban society was a fundamental organizational component and agent of nonnormative and nonlinear environmental change at various spatial and temporal scales. Urbanization, from this perspective, amounts to a form of environmental disturbance to which the natural system and, subsequently, human systems respond in dialectical fashion. This model of urban human ecology thus disposed of earlier nature-society, urban-rural dualisms to argue that cities are, in fact, fully functioning and viable ecosystems and that the politically charged “degradation” is better understood and explained as a form of systemic change to which urban societies respond and adapt. The 1997 emergence of the flagship journal Urban Ecosystems and the parallel development of the, traditionally nonurban, Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Project sites (funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation) in Baltimore, Maryland, and Phoenix, Arizona, signaled the legitimacy and success of this new, more interdisciplinary model of systems-based urban human ecological thinking and scholarship.

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