ABSTRACT
Urban ecology examines all forms of life, their associations with each other and people, in built-up areas dominated by human settlement and human activities. It recognizes the ecosystem impacts of urban metabolism at the local, regional, national and global scales. Examining towns and cities as ecosystems helps to explain how the three pillars of sustainability, environmental, economic and cultural, work together in both the ecosystem approach and in complex urban adaptive socio-ecological systems. Urban ecology also explores biodiversity within the city and the interdependence between urban built forms, natural regeneration and human activities that together create particular habitat niches to which organisms can adapt. Urban ecology thus embraces the relationships between ecology in cities, ecology of cities and socio-ecological systems in terms of the roles of the urbs, the civitas and the polis, recognizing that the ideals of public participation, sustainability and environmental security are sometimes irreconcilable in the face of socio-political pressures and economic and commercial realities.
