Urban Landscape Ecology: Past, Present, and Future - Landscape Ecology for Sustainable Environment and Culture - page 36

3.1 Introduction
Urbanization has been a dominant driving force for global environmental changes
and socioeconomic transformations across the world since the Industrial Revolution
between 1750 and 1850 (Grimm et al. 2008 ;Wu 2008a , 2010b ). This is especially
true during the past several decades, with the rapid development of new cities and
expansion of old ones in both developed and developing countries. For example,
Beijing, one of the oldest cities in the world, and Shenzhen, one of the fastest
growing young cities in China, both experienced rapid urban expansion during the
past several decades (He et al. 2006 , 2008 , 2011 ; Yu et al. 2009 ); Phoenix—home to
the Central Arizona-Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research Project (CAPL-
TER)—is a relatively young, but the fastest growing, city in the US (Wu et al. 2011a ,
b ; Grimm et al. 2012 ); Baltimore—home to the Baltimore Long-Term Ecological
Research Project (Baltimore LTER)—is an old port city which also has gone through
a profound landscape transformation since 1914 (Zhou et al. 2011 ) (Fig. 3.1 ).
As of 2008, more than 50 % of global human population live in urban areas, and
the number of urban residents is currently increasing by 1 million every week
(Anonymous 2010 ). According to the projections by the United Nations, 80 % of the
global population will be urban by 2050. Even after the world population stabilizes
around 2050, the urban population will continue to grow, and almost all future
Fig. 3.1 Examples of urbanization at the landscape scale—four of the best studied cities in
China and the United States: Beijing, China (3955 0 N, 11623 0 E), Shenzhen, Guangdong
Province, China (2239 0 N, 11413 0 E), Phoenix, Arizona. USA (3327 0 N, 11204 0 W), and
Baltimore, Maryland, USA (3917 0 ,76 37 0 W). The background map was obtained from http://
eduplace.com/ and the inset images of the four cities were from Google Earth ( http://
www.google.com/earth/index.html ) . The insets showing urbanization patterns for the four cities
are from several published sources (He et al. 2006 , 2008 , 2011 ; Yu et al. 2009 ; Wu et al. 2011a ,
b ; Zhou et al. 2011 ; Grimm et al. 2012 )