Biodiversité: Les services écosystémiques et la nature en ville

Abstract

Unfortunately, it is common to oppose nature and cities. This oversimplification gets in the way of acquiring knowledge about the conditions necessary for the conservation of biodiversity in anthropic environments. The objective of this paper is to go beyond the crude opposition between city and nature and highlight the complexity of the relationships that urban environments have with nature. We first show that cities and nature form two closely intertwined systems and have done so ever since cities came into being. We go on to distinguish two different ways of looking at nature in cities: the perspective that sees nature objects as part of the street furniture and another that sees nature from the angle of biodiversity. By way of conclusion, we discuss three important issues relating to the management of that biodiversity.