ABSTRACT
The overlapping of the urban and the rural under planetary urbanization presents a welcome challenge to the relationship under which the city and nature are thought: As this overlapping upsets the simple liberal relationships of integration and opposition that were possible through the historical distance between city and nature, their overlapping presents morphological and ecological imbrications –natural, human, and urban-that bring back to the fore urban-nature relations of particular relevance to urban sociology and urban ecology. This research adopts a socio-ecological approach to rethink early modern urban definitions that yielded desolate ecologies and versions of Darwinism to isolated or metaphorical studies of human and natural ecologies. It relinks the urban definition and production to the spatial dynamics inherent from the geo-ecological relationships between overlapping urban-natural dimensions. Canonical models for thinking city-nature relationships are excavated for urban-natural, socio-spatial imbrications under planetary urbanization.
