ABSTRACT
Cities comprise numerous interlocking and overlapping ecologies; they are also located within larger ecological systems, including surrounding agricultural lands. Today, cities are rampant consumers of resources and producers of waste, contributing significantly to current global environmental challenges such as climate change. Historically, urban centers have been locations for all kinds of innovation, and have depended upon extensive support networks of goods, people, and information.1 The networks that cities draw upon have always been very broad; however, most of these are pre-determined linear systems such as distribution and communications systems (roads, shipping routes, aqueducts, waste removal networks). As cities struggle to become more sustainable, and to use their creative and productive capacities in more effective ways, they will need to become better interconnected and more multi-functional, and they will need to engender more effective flows outside of established channels; in other words, cities will need to become better functioning ecologies. There is no doubt that in order to address these challenges, urban areas must change the ways in which they operate, by developing renewable energy sources, becoming denser, reducing consumption, eliminating waste, restoring ecosystems, and generally managing themselves in a more environmentally appropriate manner.2 Today, many cities are seriously addressing these issues; however, as Herbert Girardet points out, they are more achievable in small and mid-sized centers than in large contemporary mega-cities where the complexity factor is higher. 3 Instead of reiterating the well-known ideas suggested above, this chapter will examine some of the broad issues of sustainability and the structure of the contemporary city by looking at theories of landscape ecology developed by Richard T.T. Forman and others.
