Where did Urban Ecology Come From? Zev Naveh and the Total Human Ecosystem

Encountering Zev Naveh - A force of nature

One answer to the question of where urban ecology came from has to point to Zev Naveh.  When I first heard Zev Naveh (1919-2011) a professor at Israel's Technion, talking about the "total human ecosystem," I didn't get it.   Zev, whom I later hosted on a sabbatical visit to Rutgers University, was way beyond my thinking about people and ecology at the time.  I had been working on how communities of annual plants that colonized disturbed, post-agricultural lands were put together.  I was also developing and generalizing ideas about natural disturbance, and working to put succession in a connected, dynamic landscape perspective.  I was just beginning to seriously think about humans and nature as a big picture.  But at the time "landscape ecology" was just coming together.  Zev was one of the people who was developing that big new field at the time. 

One of his main points was that people were parts of real ecological landscapes.  That much I got.  That idea resonated with Richard Forman's seminal definition of landscape, exemplified by the book written with Michel Godron in 1986.  Richard and I were colleagues on the faculty of Rutgers University for about seven years.  In fact, Forman had invited Zev to Rutgers for that sabbatical year, but had been lured away by Harvard before Zev arrived.  So I became Zev's host and colleague for that academic year.  Since that visit, I had often seen Zev at national and international ecological and landscape meetings.  But I must admit, that the idea of the total human ecosystem had become a little rusty in my memory. 

Reminders

A few days ago, I was assembling papers to prepare for writing a new paper.  As is often the case, digging around in the bibliography of one paper leads to new papers, or reminds one of things that one had neglected for a while.  I came across a citation of a published lecture of Zev's that I hadn't read.  It was in an obscure publication, but fortunately The Technion had archived some of Zev's papers on an accessible website.  Here's what I was reminded of.  And the embarrassing admission is how useful Zev's thinking  -- summarized in 1992 -- about urban ecosystems remains.  Here are some nuggets, admittedly filtered through my current lens of urban ecological thinking.

• It is really useful to think of urban ecosystems as landscapes, and landscapes can exist at any scale.  There is no single landscape scale.

• Patches are actually three-dimensional things.

• Urban systems integrate biological, physical, ecological, technological, economic,  and cultural components.  This is summarized as his" total human ecosystem" idea.  Zev uses classical terms like biosphere, technosphere, and noosphere (the global network of ideas), but insisted that they are integrated in landscapes.

• Ecology's origin as a biological science colored its application to cities, where most attention was on what organisms were present and where.  Some of us later called this the ecology "in" cities approach (Pickett et al. 1997).

• A hierarchical, systems theory approach is useful for organizing thinking and suggesting both bottom up and top down control in focal components of landscapes in general -- and urban systems.  This is the holon perspective long used in systems theory, for which he cites Koestler (1969), for the idea.

• Technology is a part of urban systems, so the contemporary emphasis on social-ecological-technical systems (SETS) has a deep precedent.

•  Globalization is part of his thinking: He acknowledges that even then nearly 50% of Earth's people lived in urban areas; furthermore, technology is represented as a global system, not just a local set of tools and constructions.

• Landscape ecology -- and by extension -- urban ecology, must be transdisciplinary.

• He calls for the use not only of ecological knowledge in improving the role of urban-industrial (fossil and nuclear added to biomass powered) systems, but also ecological wisdom and ethics.  Alas, anthropologist Joseph Tinker suggests that social systems -- as drivers of environmental degradation -- are hardly ever voluntarily limited.  Rather, the collapse with the administrative and social costs of increasing complexity.)

• Ecological knowledge is crucial for urban design, and cities need "green and watered" components, perhaps ideally constituting 10% of urban land, in his opinion.

The total human ecosystem has a long history.

·        There are deep literatures in the components he brings together, going back to plant ecologist and iconoclast Frank Egler (1970) for the total human environment idea first used in discussing industrial agricultural impacts.  His brief literature cited contains classics of hierarchy theory, systems theory, and complexity theory.  Jantsch (1975) is another key contributor to Zev's thinking on complexity.

Well, it's a little sobering to find so many ideas that many of us take as hallmarks of "modern" urban ecology so well articulated and well foreshadowed so long ago.  But on the other hand, it is comforting to know that one of the inventors of landscape ecology, and one of the champions of systems theory and understanding spatial heterogeneity in ecology was pointing to the path urban ecology has followed.

Literature Cited:

The Paper this Essay is About:

Naveh, Zev. 1992. A landscape ecological approach to urban systems as part of the total human ecosystem.  Journal of the National History Museum and Institute Chiba. 2:47-62http://tx.technion.ac.il/~znaveh/files/Landscape%20Ecology%20Theory%20and%20Global%20Applications/landscape%20ecological%20approach%20to%20urban.pdf

Supporting:

Egler, F.E. 1970. The Way of Science: A Philosophy of Ecology for the Layman. Hafner, New York

Forman, R.T.T. and M. Godron. 1986. Landscape Ecology. Wiley and Sons, New York

Jantsch, E. 1975. esign for Evolution: Self-Organization and Planning in the Life of Human Systems. George Braziller, New York.

Koestler, A. 1969. Beyond atomism and holism - The concept of the holon. In Al Koestler, and J.R. Smithies, eds. Beyond Reductionism: New Perspectives in the Life Sciences. Hutchinson, London.

The Other References:

Pickett, S.T.A., W.R. Burch, Jr., and S.E. Dalton.  1997.  Guest editorial: Integrated urban ecosystem research: Themes, needs, and applications.  Urban Ecosystems 1(4):183-184. (For ecology in/of cities)

McPhearson, Timon, S.T.A. Pickett, N. Grimm, J. Niemelä, M. Alberti, T. Elmqvist, C. Weber, J. Breuste, D. Haase, and S. Qureshi.  "Advancing Urban Ecology Towards a Science of Cities." BioScience, accepted. (for social-ecological-technical systems)

Tainter, Joseph A. (1990). The Collapse of Complex Societies (1st paperback ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-38673-X.

An Obituary:

Antrop, M., & Pinto Correia, T. In memoriam Zev Naveh (1919 Amsterdam–2011 Haifa). Landscape Urban Plan. (2011), doi:10.1016/j.landurbplan.2011.06.003

Theory of Urban Heterogeneity

In order to plan for the next phase of BES, we are beginning to consider theoretical frameworks.  Here is the current status of that search.

A Multitude of Urban Theories.  There are many theories relevant to urban ecosystems.  These theories differ in their focus on specific facets of urban structure, function, or dynamics, and in their focus on one or several scales.  Broad urban theories address topics as diverse as the ancient development of cities, the scaling law of benefits and burdens of urban size, urban gradients in megaregional context, urban metabolism and footprint, urban biodiversity, species homogenization and adaptation, political ecology, industrial modernization, and many others.  Urban theories have emerged from disciplines as diverse as sociology, architecture, urban planning, and economics.  This document introduces a candidate theory for BES: a theory of urban heterogeneity.

Jobs of Theory.  There are two main jobs for BES theory: 1) Motivating the hypotheses behind specific research projects within BES; and 2) Clearly linking the diverse specialized activities in BES to a multidisciplinary framework.  In addition, our theory should help organize research and education in the context of Baltimore’s metropolitan shift from a sanitary to a sustainable city and help meet the challenges of climate change.  What theory might the Baltimore Ecosystem Study use to move forward? 

A Candidate Framework.  BES has helped pioneer the social-ecological approach to metropolitan ecosystems and of urban regions consisting of cities, suburbs, exurbs, and rural lands.  This approach recognizes spatial heterogeneity at various scales, ranging from individual parcels to the entire urban region.  Although we have used this perspective, in the form of patch dynamics, from the beginning of BES, important improvements in the understanding of urban systems suggest that we should attempt to articulate a new, inclusive theory of urban spatial heterogeneity.  Advances in understanding the spatial dimensions of biogeophysical and social sciences must be accommodated.  

A newly articulated theory for BES could emerge from an overarching hypothesis: spatial heterogeneity at various scales, and reflecting the key structures and processes in the metropolis, drives social-ecological interactions and dynamics. 

Nested within the overarching hypothesis would be specific subtheories or model domains that specify the different, key structures and processes we deem important in the Baltimore ecosystem.  The choice of the subtheories should build on empirical experience in Baltimore as well as on the broader social and biogeophysical theories our team brings to the table.

The subtheories of urban heterogeneity match the fundamental structure of ecosystems.  We focus on 1) the flux of materials across heterogeneous space, 2) the biotic potential of different patches, with its implications for nutrient retention and ecosystem production in the urban mosaic, and 3) the design and management decisions by human institutional.  These three subtheories can help connect the overarching hypothesis to our specific long-term data, experiments, and syntheses.

The discussions at the steering committee meeting on September 21 should identify key model types, data streams, and the organizing hypotheses in each of these three major urban ecosystem realms.

Baltimore's Urbanite Magazine Explores Big Urban Theory

The Urbanite (www.urbanitebaltimore.com) is one of Baltimore’s cultural and intellectual treasures.  Available free at many locations, or by subscription for those who don’t get to town every month, it is always a treat to see the diverse contributions of good writing, photography, and art the editors have gathered together.

Over the past few months Urbanite ran two pieces that struck me as Big Urban Theory.  Big Theory is a general explanation of the way some phenomenon is structured or works.  Theory in its technical sense as used here doesn’t mean just a guess, or something less than certain.  One of the big theories appears in an interview by Baynard Woods of Edward Glaeser, Harvard economist and urbanist, who was in town to talk to the Downtown Partnership.  Glaeser is author of an impressive book, The Triumph of the City.  The other was a feature written by Michael Anft, entitled “City By the Numb3r5,” which summarized and explained the work of Geoffrey West and Luis Bettencourt of the Santa Fe Institute, a deep think tank focusing on complexity.

  

What's Right With Cities.  Glaeser touts the city as the cradle of innovation, and indeed considers it to be humanity’s greatest invention.  He argues that cities are a mechanism to promote interaction among diverse people, give space for creativity, and contain the critical mass that makes this all work.  Among his recommendations to take advantage of the power of cities is to enhance urban density by promoting vertical growth.  Such density entails efficiencies of energy and transportation.  This is one part of a very general, or big, urban theory.  

Notably, however, Glaeser neglects the biophysical aspects of urban structure and function, and gives no credit to the efficiencies that can be gained by allowing biological work to remain a part of the urban realm, or to be reinvigorated where it has been paved over or otherwise displaced.  The creative stimulus that can result from interaction of people with natural processes -- with their own rhythms, peaks, and pulses – is also absent from Glaeser’s recipe for urban creativity.  Glaeser’s main points are still quite valuable even though he neglects the biological ecology that I am so fascinated by.

Big Number Theory for the City.  In the second piece, headlined with numbers substituting for some of the letters, a la a clever high security Internet password, the allometric theory of cities is central.  This theory, exemplified by the work of West and Bettencourt, indicates that the major properties of cities are a mathematical function of their size.  Comparing cities worldwide, they discovered that for each doubling in population, the infrastructure of a city increases only 85%.  Some functions, such as carbon footprints, also increase at the same proportion, reflecting the efficiency of dense urban development.  Crime, gross domestic product, income, and innovation as measured by patents, increase on the same trend – more than a 15% advantage compared to the expectation based on a simple linear relationship.  So both positives and negatives have the same quantitative relationships to urban population density.

Such things as history, geography, and urban design or planning have secondary roles to play in the characteristics of each city in this big comparison.  However, the deviation from the trend line helps identify characteristics for which policy and design might have particular power to intervene.

Again, the theory is relatively silent about the place of biophysical processes in the relationship.  This is a gap worth filling.  Furthermore, the theory addresses urban aggregations rather than specific districts and neighborhoods.  Given that most theories have a hierarchy of generality, with the most universal and abstract relationships on top, so to speak, and increasingly fine-scaled, detailed models of structure and function coming lower down in the hierarchy, where focus is on very specific places, events, and interactions.  Urban theory would seem to benefit from such a hierarchical structure.  

The Search for Mid-Level Theory.  The recent pieces in the Urbanite have focused on the biggest urban theories that exist so far.  Its interesting foray into this heady and exciting realm has left unaddressed the question of what “middle level theory” might be helpful in doing.  I expect that the middle level theory might help in bringing more ecological understanding to bear in urban areas, and identifying fruitful levers of intervention that neighborhood communities and local managers might take advantage of.

The Urbanite has done a marvelous job of highlighting the grand unifying theory explaining global differentiation in urban characteristics, and indicating how any city is constrained in both good and bad ways by its size.  But the grand theory leaves in obscure shadows the specific ecological functions that are of interest and value within metropolitan areas, their neighborhoods, and watersheds, for example.  For that, the finer-scaled models, data, and relevant concepts are needed.  This is a focus of the major, nationally important research effort underway in Baltimore in the form of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study Long-Term Ecological Research project.

Bibliography

For further reading, the two pieces in the Urbanite, as well as an original article by Bettencourt and West, and a piece in the New York Times Sunday Magazine are cited below.  

Anft, M. 2011.  City By the Numb3r5.  Urbanite. http://www.urbanitebaltimore.com/baltimore/c1ty-by-numb3r5/Content?oid=1467248

Bettencort, L. and G. West (2010). "A unified theory of urban living." Nature 467: 912-913.

Lehrer, J.  2010.  A Physicist Solves the City.  The New York Times, December 17, 2010.  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/magazine/19Urban_West-t.html?pagewanted=all

Woods, B. 2012.  Defending the City. Urbanite. http://www.urbanitebaltimore.com/baltimore/defending-the-city/Content?oid=1463027