Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
percentiles of the different categories. This and other classifications are a frontier
tool for urban ecology to promote within and cross-system comparisons.
Integration for Practice
Urban ecological science can be integrated with a number of professional practices.
This section illustrates its potential for linkage with urban design and planning,
environmental justice, and adaptive processes supporting sustainability. Further
integration can emerge from dialog with the concerns of urban policy makers and
managers.
Integrating with Urban Design and Planning
Urban design incorporates the activities of architects and landscape architects and
often focuses on individual sites, on neighborhoods, or spatially extensive develop-
ment or redevelopment projects. Urban planning, in contrast, brings aspects of that
same knowledge set together with knowledge about policy, governance, and regula-
tion and generates coarse-scale designs for large areas or regions. Master planning is
a synonym for this coarser-scale pursuit. Both have traditions that express concern
with ecology as a relevant knowledge base or approach. One tradition takes analogies
with evolution or ecological processes as a touchstone. This tradition began with
Geddes in Scotland, who is one of the founders of modern landscape architecture [
50
].
Ecological analogies have been common among those who wish to bring an ecologi-
cal perspective to the urban design and planning professions. This is in part because
there has been until recently so little empirical ecological research in urban systems.
In this knowledge gap, idealized successional trends from simple to spatially complex
systems, ending in a stable “climax,” have been brought to bear. Other analogies
adopted in the design professions have been the classical ecological expectation of
equilibrium in systems. A still larger and deeply flawed analogy has been the adoption
of an organism-like life cycle for cities and towns. The life cycle analogy was used to
justify policies of physical intervention to circumvent undesired changes in cities. Of
course, the assumption that physical change was sufficient to address social problems
is another questionable assumption, often tacit, that was used along with life cycle
analysis to justify such interventions as slum clearance. Unfortunately, these
analogies are not supported by the contemporary knowledge base in ecological
science itself. Succession is a probabilistic process that does not lead inexorably
toward some ideal state. Equilibrium composition is rarely obtained in ecological
systems, even though material balances and thermodynamic processes can be used to
understand the structure and function of ecosystems.
In contrast to the use of ecological analogies, which is necessarily limited by the
superficiality of the visualizations transferred to design, ecological substance has
informed a growing number of designers. In Europe, analyses of “ecotopes,”
