Urban Ecology

For many the phrase “urban ecology” is an oxymoron, as urban development disrupts and destroys ecosystems. Yet, with more than half the world’s population living in cities, we must learn to live more ecologically in urban environments.  Solving urban problems begins with seeing each city, with its suburbs and surrounding countryside, “as a single, evolving system within nature.” This means that: “Nature in the city must be cultivated, like a garden, rather than ignored or subdued.”

Anne Whiston Spirn writes: "The city is a granite garden, composed of many smaller gardens, set in a garden world. Parts of the granite garden are cultivated intensively, but the greater part is unrecognized and neglected.  To the idle eye, trees and parks are the sole remnants of nature in the city. But nature in the city is far more than trees and gardens, and weeds in sidewalk cracks and vacant lots. It is the air we breathe, the earth we stand on, the water we drink and excrete, and the organisms with which we share our habitat. Nature in the city…is rain and the rushing sound of underground rivers buried in storm sewers. It is water from a faucet, delivered by pipes from some outlying river or reservoir, then used and washed away into the sewer, returned to the waters of river and sea. Nature in the city is an evening breeze, a corkscrew eddy swirling down the face of a building, the sun and the sky. Nature in the city is dogs and cats, rats in the basement, pigeons on the sidewalks, raccoons in culverts, and falcons crouched on skyscrapers. It is the consequence of a complex interaction between the multiple purposes and activities of human beings and other living creatures and of the natural processes that govern the transfer of energy, the movement of air, the erosion of the earth, and the hydrologic cycle."

Anne Whiston Spirn, “City and Nature,” in Stephen M. Wheeler and Timothy Beatley, eds., The Sustainable Urban Development Reader (London: Routledge, 2004), 115.