Urban Landscape Ecology: Past, Present, and Future - Landscape Ecology for Sustainable Environment and Culture - page 41

landscapes exhibit the most conspicuously heterogeneous patterns among all
landscapes, and thus are ideal objects for applying and testing landscape metrics
and spatial statistical methods. From a more dynamic perspective, urbanization is
fundamentally a spatial process, and its understanding relies on spatially explicit
methods that characterize landscape ecological studies. Second, urbanization and
its ecological impacts have gained unprecedented impetus in research during the
past 20 years as we have entered a new urbanization era. The urban landscape (the
city and its surrounding areas or a metropolitan region) has emerged as a primary
scale for urban studies. In fact, one may argue that a landscape approach is not
only appropriate in theory but also imperative in practice for urban ecology and
urban sustainability. Given the increasingly urban nature of our landscapes and the
increasingly urban future of humanity, urban sustainability is becoming ''an
inevitable goal of landscape research'' (Wu 2010b ).
3.3 From Urban Ecology to Urban Landscape Ecology
To discuss the present and future of urban landscape ecology, it is helpful to recall
important milestones in the history of urban ecology. This is because urban
landscape ecology may be viewed as a product of the integration between land-
scape ecology and urban ecology. Several recent reviews on the history of urban
ecology can be found elsewhere (Pickett et al. 2001 , 2011 ;Wu 2008a , b , 2013b ;
McDonnell 2011 ). To illustrate how urban landscape ecology is related to urban
ecology, here we provide a synopsis of the evolution of different perspectives and
approaches in urban ecological research since its early years (Fig. 3.4 ).
The earliest version of ''urban ecology'' was developed in the 1920s, as part of
human ecology, by the Chicago school of sociology, championed by Robert E.
Park and Ernest W. Burgess (Park et al. 1925 ). In other words, urban ecology was
born in a ''social science family,'' as a sociological approach that uses ecological
concepts (e.g., competition, ecological niches, and succession) and natural selec-
tion theory as organic analogies to study the social life and societal structures in
the city. The key idea of this urban ecology approach is that competition for land
and resources in an urban area leads to the continuous structuring of the city space
into ecological niches (e.g., zones) through ''invasion-succession'' cycles (to put it
blatantly, the poor and immigrants come in and the rich and ''original'' move out).
Spatial and social differentiations occur consequently, and different social groups
occupy different zones (or niches). This idea is epitomized in the concentric zone
theory (Park et al. 1925 ). The Chicago school urban ecology was quite influential
for a few decades, but largely disregarded by the 1950s as criticisms mounted of its
neglecting the roles cultural and social factors (e.g., race and ethnicity) as well as
planning and industrialization. This sociological tradition of urban ecology is still
alive today as one may often find a chapter or a section on urban ecology in most
sociology textbooks (but rarely in classic ecology texts). In fact, one may argue
that understanding the relationship between spatial and social structures in the city