ABSTRACT
The place where I live – Lubbock, Texas – is home to just over 200,000 people. I moved there from one of the largest cities in the United States: Phoenix, Arizona, home to nearly 3 million people. Coming from Phoenix, Lubbock did not appear very urban to me – there were few high-rise buildings, only a small selection of restaurants and shops, a commuter rush hour that lasted only 15 minutes, hardly any high-density housing, and little crime, graffiti, or noise. Instead, there were patches of wildflowers within undeveloped lots inside the city limits and a multitude of stars visible in a night sky untroubled by light pollution. I settled myself in for a more bucolic lifestyle than that to which I had become accustomed in Phoenix. One of my first students, however, came from Loving County, Texas – only about 270 kilometers away, this is the least-populated county in the U.S., discounting the vast wilderness of Alaska: there were just 67 people living in this 1753 km2 county in the year 2000. To that student, Lubbock was an imposing city, a true urban environment. The term “urban” is one of those readily comprehensible words that, upon reflection, lack precision (like “disturbance” and “heterogeneity”). Understanding urbanization’s influence on the world will be hindered without an acknowledgment that the same term can mean different things to different people. This point was first brought home to me when I started working on an urban ecology project involving dozens of people from a wide variety of fields – there were biologists, sociologists, landscape architects, land-use planners, economists, and many others. Our meetings were clumsy affairs at first, characterized by a vague sense of déjà vu – hadn’t we already discussed this? Isn’t that group of project workers reinventing the wheel? We soon realized that many of our frustrations stemmed from a lack of consistent and coherent communication, particularly between the social and natural sciences, about what was truly urban (as opposed to the broader concept of being human-dominated but not urban per se) and thus within our purview. This led two colleagues and me to write a paper discussing this problem and suggesting several variables beyond population size that should be included in any study on urban ecology (McIntyre et al. 2000). In this chapter, I shall expand upon that initial “urban definition” paper by exploring traits that are characteristic of urban areas and approaches that have been taken in studying cities as unique ecosystems. Because urban areas are synthetic ecosystems that
encompass natural and anthropogenic components, any working definition of what it means to be urban must encompass the full breadth of the people-environment relationship in order to guide action such as land-use planning, development, and future research.
