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Urban Ecology is the study of ecosystems that include humans living in cities and urbanizing landscapes.
It is an emerging, interdisciplinary field that aims to understand how human and ecological
processes can coexist in human-dominated systems and help societies with their efforts to become
more sustainable. It has deep roots in many disciplines including sociology, geography, urban planning,
landscape architecture, engineering, economics, anthropology, climatology, public health, and
ecology. Because of its interdisciplinary nature and unique focus on humans and natural systems,
the term “urban ecology” has been used variously to describe the study of humans in cities, of nature
in cities, and of the coupled relationships between humans and nature. Each of these research areas
is contributing to our understanding of urban ecosystems and each must be understood to fully grasp
the science of Urban Ecology. Therefore, in Urban Ecology: an international perspective on the
interaction between humans and nature, we introduce students and practitioners of urban ecology to
its roots, bases, and prospects by way of a diverse collection of historical and modern foundational
readings. We editors are urban ecologists from the United States, Italy, and Germany who together
view these readings as a fair representation of the importance of both natural and social sciences to
Urban Ecology.
In this book we collect important papers in the field of Urban Ecology that both set the foundations
for the discipline and illustrate modern approaches, from a variety of perspectives and regions
of the world. We do this by reprinting important publications, filling gaps in the published literature
with a few targeted original works, and translating several key works originally published in German.
Our hope is that this collection of thoughts will provide students, practitioners, and professionals
with a rich background in some of the core facets of Urban Ecology.
As you study these readings, it may be useful to consider the city as a set of strongly interacting
systems or spheres. The urban ecosystem includes abiotic spheres (the atmosphere, hydrosphere,
lithosphere, and soil or pedosphere) and biotic spheres (often viewed as an interacting biosphere
of urban plants and animals plus the socio-economic world of people, the anthroposphere; Fig. 1).
The readings deal with each of these spheres, and also with the connections between and amongst
them. These connections have been and continue to be viewed very differently by the authors of the
articles in this collection. The relative importance of the spheres changes with one’s research bias,
but more importantly the way and extent that authors have represented the connections among the
spheres (or even the degree of isolation of the spheres) differs vastly. Look for these differences as
you read the collection. Our view is that the interrelated processes among the subsystems (spheres)
must be studied and understood to understand the ecology of a city. This is what modern Urban
Ecology strives to do. |
