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

Are You an Urbanist?

Urbanists and the Old Walls

The term, urbanist, originally meant someone who designed and built cities.  The term is an old one, and when it was introduced into English in the 16th century, cities were very different than now.  Many cities were walled, defensive, or religious centers.  The boundary and contrast between city and country was sharp and distinct.  In fact, urban is derived from the Latin, urbis, which means a walled city or town.  Gates and battlements were essential features of the city, and people whose presence was not desired in the secure city after nightfall, camped below the walls that excluded them.  They were relegated to the suburbs, literally, the place below the wall.

The walls of Marrakesh, 1990 (S.T.A. Pickett)

In the walled city, there was little space for nature.  Streets of such places were often narrow and hemmed in by buildings.  Perhaps the pleasant courtyards of the houses of the well to do had a few trees, flowering vines, or potted plants.  But streams, gardens, farms, and the threatening and dark forest, were all outside the walls.  Urbanists in the classical and original sense thus worked with stone and mortar, timber and plaster.  A philosophy developed from these practices that separated city and country.

Wall Street in New York City signals a distant memory of the defensive stockade that protected colonial New Amsterdam from the non-colonized remainder of Manhattan; the massive walls of Beijing were demolished under Mao to signal the break of modern China from the imperial, feudal past; the walls of Paris are now traced by Haussmann’s boulevards – itself a term derived from the French word for the defensive constructions we know in English as bulwarks.

Beyond the Walls

A New Orleans courtyard

So urbanists – those concerned with the form and processes of dense, heterogeneous human settlements – are no longer hemmed in by walls.  Nor must they neglect urban nature due to a lack of space, or due to a philosophical dialectic between nature and city.  Contemporary urban form is manifestly inclusive and diverse.  

City-Suburban-Exurban Systems: The Expanded Territory of Urbanists

Baltimore City and part of Baltimore County.

In BES, we often use the term “urban” to stand for the entirety of porous urban regions.  A neologism we have introduced is CSE, or city-suburban-exurban, to stand for the spatially extensive systems that contemporary settlements often represent.  Throughout this diverse range of districts, neighborhoods, land uses, and densities of occupancy, planners follow the lead of pioneers such as McHarg (1969) or Spirn (1984) in recognizing the need for plans and designs to blend the built and the natural.  

This same inclusiveness supports our research strategy of addressing the CSE as a hybrid system comprising the built and the natural, the intentional and the incidental.  So, the term urbanist can include all of us who are concerned with the existing and potential structure and functioning of CSE systems.  Urbanists go beyond the “walls” and they see and value nature within the porous boundaries of CSE regions.

So, are you an urbanist?

References

McGrath, B. and S.T.A. Pickett. 2011. The Metacity: A conceptual framework for integrating ecology and urban design. Special Issue: Challenges in City Design: Realize the Value of Cities. Website: http://www.mdpi.com/si/challenges/city_design/  Guest Editor: Prof. Dr. Kongjian Yu. Challenges 2011, 2, 55-72 doi:10.3390/challe2040055

McHarg, I. 1969. Design with nature. Doubleday/Natural History Press, Garden City, NJ.

Spirn, A. W. 1984. The granite garden: urban nature and human design. Basic Books, New York.

Swamps and the City

Laura A. Ogden, of Florida International University is an anthropologist and Co-Principal Investigator of the Florida Coastal Everglades LTER.  She is also a regular collaborator with the BES community and has been involved with us and others in cross site projects concerning environmental justice, and the social ecology of lawns.  She has additional projects addressing land cover change, political ecology, and vulnerability to hurricanes, among others (http://fcelter.fiu.edu/about_us/personnel/profiles/index.htm?resnum=156&display=projects).  So her recent book, entitled Swamplife: People, Gators, and Mangroves Entangled in the Everglades (2011, Univ. of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis), is of interest to our community.

Photo by Deborah Mitchell.  

 

Ogden’s book ranges widely, dealing with how Native American peoples, white alligator hunters, scientists, conservationists, and even outlaws, created various conceptual and literal landscapes in the Everglades.  The reciprocity of the natural – alligators, snakes (real and imagined), mangroves, hydrological fluctuations, and fire, with the human – lifeways, laws, territorial claims, the politics of scientific exploration, and the establishment and enforcement of state and national parks, are all part of swamplife.  This concern with the hybridity of landscapes in the Everglades parallels our conceptualization of the Baltimore region.

Hybrid Landscapes

Even though the Everglades is now and has always been a hybrid human-natural system, as Ogden so engagingly shows, mainstream or outside culture has neglected or erased much of the entangled human history and intimate inhabitation of the Everglades.  Reading this book is a trip through several good yarns, interesting interviews with people who once made their living by hunting in the ‘Glades, and documentation of how some key habitats came to be considered wild and imminently conservable.  For example, Royal Palm Hammock was seen by early scientific explorers as a pristine tropical outlier, untouched by human history.  Any Indian effects were disregarded as having been essentially a part of the wild landscape.  However, the hammocks, as high ground in a watery ‘scape, were precious sites for all who occupied, lived in, traversed, or made their living in the Everglades.  Such was the case prior to European contact and through the early 20th century when even the poor white residents were finally dispossessed to establish the national park.  Indeed, the intensity of human entanglement with the hammocks is illustrated by the evidence that many were at least partially constructed by accretion of the debris of people’s everyday life before the historic record began. 

Overcoming Erasure

Much of the academic and practical approach to the Everglades has intentionally or accidentally erased the human side of the story.  Ogden succeeds in bringing the human history of the Everglades and its erasures to light.  She puts the humans back in the picture.  She also highlights the role of class as well as ethnicity in such erasures.  

Overcoming human erasure parallels one of the big tasks we have in the Baltimore as well.  Urban systems have been predominantly seen as strictly human places.  Of course there are deep roots of knowledge about the entanglements of nature in cities.  But the weight of the academy has been on the human side of the scale.  We, like Ogden in Swamplife, struggle to understand how humans and nature are entangled in the system we study.  However, in the City-Suburban-Exurban system the erasure has been opposite to the one she overcomes in her book.  We are peeling back the assumptions that have allowed people to erase the natural in the city.  So there are many ways in which the city and the swamp are fighting the same intellectual battles.  People and nature go together, whether in town or out.