Urban Ecology : An International Perspective on the Interaction Between Humans and Nature

to a Research Project Ernest W. Burgess Abstract The aggregation of urban population has been described by Bücher and Weber. A soc- logical study of the growth of the city, however, is concerned with the de nition and description of processes, as those of (a) expansion, (b) metabolism, and (c) mobility. The typical tendency of urban growth is the expansion radially from its central business district by a series of concentric circles, as (a) the central business district, (b) a zone of deterioration, (c) a zone of workingmen’s homes, (d)a residential area, and (e) a commuters’ zone. Urban growth may be even more fundamentally stated as the resultant of processes of organization and disorganization, like the anabolic and katabolic processes of metabolism in the human body. The distribution of population into the natural areas of the city, the division of labor, the differentiation into social and cultural groupings, represent the normal manifestations of urban metabolism, as statistics of disease, crime, disorder, vice, insanity, and suicide are rough indexes of its abnormal expression. The state of metabolism of the city may, it is suggested, be measured by mobility, de ned as a change of movement in response to a new stimulus or situation. Areas in the city of the greatest mobility are found to be also regions of juvenile delinquency, boys’ gangs, crime, poverty, wife desertion, divorce, abandoned infants, etc.

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. The 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.

This book presents important papers in the field of Urban Ecology that both set the foundations for the discipline and to illustrate modern approaches, from a variety of perspectives and regions of the world. The editors 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. The aim of this collection is to provide students, practitioners, and professionals with a rich background in some of the core facets of Urban Ecology.