PARENT SESSION
Symposium #19: Cities of Resilience: Integrating Ecology into Urban Planning, Design, Policy, and Management .
Organized by: L Musacchio and J Wu
Wednesday, August 7. 8:00 AM to 11:30 AM. Leo Rich Theatre.
Urban human ecology.
Steiner, Frederick*,1, 1 The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas
ABSTRACT- Cities are a human ecosystem. Eight concepts assist us in understanding human ecosystems in terms of variability, time and complexity. These concepts include: systems thinking; language, culture, and technology; structure, function, and change; edges, boundaries, and ecotones; interaction, integration and institution; diversity; adaptation; and holism. These concepts can be best understood by considering human settlements hierarchically, that is from a more immediate scale to the global. Habitat, community, landscape, region, nation-state, and planet provide examples of hierarchical scales. For cities specifically, community, landscape, and region are especially important. In this paper, the eight concepts will be explored and applied to community, landscape, and region for an urban context.
KEY WORDS: human, urban, community, landscape