[URBAN NOTE] "In and Of the City: The Cost of Urban Ecology’s Foundational Distinction"

[rfmcdonald]

Liam Heneghan's 3 Quarks Daily essay takes a look at the connection between urban ecologies and urban societies. It's a long essay, worth considering in full; some representative samples are below.

Urban ecology, the environmental sciences youngest and most rambunctious cousin, is in a position to influence the design of the cities of the future. Its clout comes from its willingness to think big, to think about the ecology of entire cities as if they were just any other ecosystem. Urban ecologists call this big picture view the “ecology of the city”.

From this disciplinary perspective, Chicago is just another savannah, one where admittedly the commonest species is the human animal.

However, by taking this bird’s eye view of cities, is urban ecology losing sight of the bird-on-the-ground? I mean this quite literally. Is urban ecology losing it roots in natural history? Will the successful cultivation of relationships with decision makers, municipal authorities, city planners and other governmental powers-that-be, come at the expense of urban ecologists’ knowledge about birds, wildlife, beetles and the other creeping things inhabiting the city?

[. . .]

Urban ecology is not the first discipline to encounter the tensions accompanying distinctions between the bird’s-eye view and the bird-on-the-ground view of the city. An instructive example found in the work of Michel deCerteau (1925-1986) who makes of this tension a theory of the everyday interactions of people who both conform to and resist the strictures of the culture to which they belong.

[. . .]

An influential chapter in deCerteau’s book The Practice of Everyday Life is aptly entitled Walking in the City. In it deCerteau illustrated his broader thesis concerning the differences between tactics and strategies. Strategies are concerned with “force-relationships” that can be exercised when an entity can be separated from an environment. A city, a proprietor, a scientific institution serve as deCerteau’s examples here. Each can be held up and inspected as separate analyzable units, each has its own distinct place – its headquarters, or at the very least it occupies lines on a map. Tactics, on the other hand, are not so easily localized. Tactics are usually deployed on the sly, “poached” to use deCerteau’s term, on someone else’s territory.

A simple way of understanding what deCerteau’s is arguing is to contrast those individuals, institutions, or governments who have grand conceptions of the city, with the pedestrians, jaywalkers, flâneurs, who make their own plans, and take up the business of living in the city in ways that are simultaneously constrainted and resisting of these grand designs. He dramatizes the distinction by opening the chapter’s narrative from his perch on the 110th floor of the World Trade Center. From there one get’s a bird’s eye view, indeed a planner’s view, of the entire city. Peering down at the insect-like pedestrians swarming beneath him, he sees in their movement a type of pedestrian-grammar.

The city may be produced by those with visions of the city, but it is consumed in a creative, one might say productive way, by those who walk in the city.

All this rarified talk becomes concrete when one thinks about the everyday practices of pedestrians treading the city streets. The act of walking becomes strange, even given a slight revolutionary tinge, when one recalls how the manners of pedestrians can cut across the designs of city managers, proprietors, planners, and other strategic officers.

[. . .]
Urban ecology which only emerged as a distinct subdiscipline in ecology in the 1970s has made a lot of its own use of the in and of distinction. The distinction is regarded as a significant conceptual leap forward. It places uni-disciplinary, small scale ecological studies on one side, and multidisciplinary, multiscalar studies, especially those that examine the human and non-human aspects of nature simultaneously, on the other.

[. . .]

A study of the physical environment, the soil, or the biota of a city or a neighborhood would be considered ecology “in” the city. These studies can be aggregated to allow for generalities to emerge. Cities tend, for instance, to have their own distinctive climatic situations. Rain is more frequently in cities than in the hinterlands. City temperatures tend to increase as population grows up to a certain limit at least. These climatic differences have, in turn, implications for vegetation growing in the city. Spring comes earlier in urban areas. Decomposition of dead organic matter occurs a little faster. Tree cover changes as cities develop (decreasing in forested areas, increasing in desert areas). Urban vegetation is weedier, with more non-natives, but diversity can be high since plant diversity oftentimes follows the money. The richer the human population the lusher is the vegetation. City mammals tend to be moderately sized carnivores. All the above insights emerge from within the “ecology in the city” paradigm.

“Ecology of the city” takes an explicitly systems view of things. By system here is meant a set of entities that interact to make a connected whole. In what manner do the elements of the city the human and non-human aspects of nature interact to contribute to an emergent whole city? Among the examples that Pickett and his colleagues give are studies of the amount of pollutants or carbon taken up (sequestered being the $100 term preferred by ecologists) by all the trees in Chicago. Studies of the flow of crucial nutrients like nitrogen (a key element for the growth of vegetation, but also a contributor to the fouling of water bodies) have been done on the scale of entire cities. For instance, fascinating whole system evaluations of nutrient flow are conducted as part of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study, where Pickett is a project leader. The resource accounting tool of “ecological footprinting”, developed by William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, provides another example. Footprinting is not only a way to make us feel miserable about our personal environmental impact; it can used to have an entire metropolitan area hang its head in shame. A simple back of the envelope calculation reveals that the footprint of Chicago is larger than the state in which it is located!

In another influential early review Nancy Grimm, a professor at Arizona State University and a project leader at the Central Arizona – Phoenix Long Term Ecological Research project and her colleagues also utilize the in and of distinction and they identify similar systems-oriented hallmarks of the latter type of study. In particular, they call for integration of social science approaches with more traditional approaches to ecology, and they illustrate what this looks like with a series of increasingly sophisticated conceptual models revealing the interaction of physical, ecological, and social variables. They conclude that without insight into the integration of the human and the ecological perspectives at local and global scales urban ecology will be less effective in guiding public policy and management.