Humans as a Component of Ecosystems

Abstract

One of the greatest challenges for natural and social scientists over the next few decades will be to understand how urbanizing regions evolve through the extraordinarily complex interactions between humans and biophysical processes. The challenge is to incorporate this complexity in studying urban ecosystems and their evolution. For more than a century, urban theorists have struggled to understand urban systems and their dynamics. During the second half of the last century, ecological scholars started to recognize the subtle human-natural interplay governing the ecology of urbanizing regions. Both social and natural scientists concur that assessing future urban scenarios will be crucial in order to make decisions about urban development, land use, and infrastructure so we can minimize their ecological impact. But to fully understand the interactions between urban systems and ecology, we will have to redefine the role of humans in ecosystems and the relationships between urban planning and ecology (Alberti et al. 2003). That the city evolves as part of both its natural and social history was already clear to Geddes (1915) a century ago. Social ecologists such Mumford (1956), Dubos (1968) and Bookchin (1980) each conceived of the idea of evolutionary humanism from very different perspectives, but they all referred to the continuity between the human and natural world. Pioneer scholars in the social sciences (Park et al. 1925, Burgess 1925, Duncan 1960) and natural sciences (Odum 1963, Sukopp and Werner 1982, Holling and Orians 1971, Dunne and Leopold 1978) as well as in the fields of urban design and planning (McHarg 1969, Hough 1984, Spirn 1984, Lyle 1985) have produced important knowledge in the study of urban ecosystems within their disciplines. More recently in The Nature of Economies Jane Jacobs (2000) emphasized that humans exist wholly within nature as part of the natural order in every respect. This view is shared by many historians (Cronon 1991, 1996, Melosi 2000, Klingle 2001), geographers (Zimmerer 1994, Robbins and Sharp 2003, Kaika 2005), anthropologists (Abel and Stepp 2003, Wali et al. 2003, Redman 2005), and planners (Beatley and Manning 1977, Steiner 2002, Alberti et al. 2003) who are engaged in efforts to understand human dominated ecosystems.