Urban ecology is the study of community structure and organization as manifest in cities and other relatively dense human settlements. Among its major topics, urban ecology is concerned with the patterns of urban community sorting and change by socioeconomic status, life cycle, and ethnicity, and with patterns of relations across systems of cities Of particular concern is the dynamic evolution of cities and contrast in urban structure across time periods, societies, and urban scale.
The notion of community is central to urban ecology, a premise of the ecological approach is that the aggregation of persons into communities has important implications for their life chances, for the behavior of groups, and for aggregate outcomes. A further aspect of community organization lies in its geographic manifestation, although a mere geographic reductionism would not accurately capture the theoretical or empirical approach of the ecological perspective.
A sub area of human ecology – a social science paradigm that seeks to understand the relationship between human organization and its environment, both in terms of physical set ting and sustenance – the study of urban ecology has been interdisciplinary. Work in ecology has touched on sociology, demography, geography, economics, and anthropology, usually emphasizing the urban sectors of those disciplines. And at various times, human urban ecology has been more or less connected to biological ecology.
As Franklin Wilson argued, ecology is one of the oldest specializations within sociology and the intellectual roots of urban ecology can be found in the origins of sociology itself. For example Emile Durkheim’s The Division of Labor in Society (1893) argued that modern societies are comprised of functionally interdependent units that are necessary for their survival and progress.
As an explicit sociological approach, urban ecology is particularly associated with the Chicago School of sociology in the early twentieth century, even though the connection extends to a wide range of scholars and groups interested in cities and in population processes. The massive growth of cities at this time, fueled by the immigration of diverse origin populations, helped spur the interest in urban form and function, and hence urban ecology as a subject of interest.
Studies at this time of specific urban communities, such as Louis Wirth’s The Ghetto (1928) and Harvey Zorbaugh’s The Gold Coast and the Slum (1929), and of city form and sub communities more generally, such as Robert Park, Ernest Burgess and Roderick McKenzie’s The City (1925),offer key illustrations of early treatments by the Chicago School, also known as the classical position.
Additional concern in this era was with land rents and gradients, which not only helped explain the distribution of social groups, but also connected to the evolving interest in urban economics. These early notions of human ecology gave way to more statistically intensive and geo graphically driven analyses of human organization in urban physical space.
Considerable analysis was devoted in the middle to late twentieth century to the dimensions of urban social structure. These included extensive analyses of patterns of residential segregation, urban growth, and differentiation. The application of factor analysis, or “factorial ecology” in the nomenclature, identified life cycle, socioeconomic status, and ethnicity as key dimensions of urban ecological sorting.
The ecological approach then came under criticism from various quarters, the most notable early critic being Milla Alihan. The biological metaphor was seen as strained, limiting the crucial elements of human volition and cognition. Urban ecology was also at risk of appearing spatially deterministic and attention to the relative spatial position and mapping of social phenomena lent credence to the critique.
Furthermore, ecological approaches were criticized methodologically, even generating a phrase, “the ecological fallacy,” that has traversed into general social science parlance. The fallacy is the error of making inferences about individual behavior from analysis of phenomena at the aggregate level. In the middle of the twentieth century, human (and hence urban) ecology received additional formulations, with perhaps the broadest theoretical treatment arising in Amos Hawley’s Human Ecology (1950).
This treatise emphasized the study of the community and the dynamic connections among individuals, human organization, and the environment. Around the same time the widely adopted POET frame work came to the fore: Population, Organization, Environment, Technology. This POET paradigm is also part of the neoclassical or neo orthodox approach and it provides an intellectual rubric for organizing the thinking about urban phenomena and community processes within them.
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