Steward Pickett
Evolving Theoretical Frameworks for Urban Ecological Science: The Global and Regional Metacity
"City" - downtown, suburbs, commercial, industrial, etc. but the city encompasses more than just those areas
Old City assumptions include - We have long assumed that city and country are distinct
more after the break
Sprawl even in places like Belfort, France
The new global reality is a heightened level of urbanization around the world. But in places already urbanized, change continues.
New assumptions: Agriculture embedded inside cities
New assumptions: City of remittance - residents elsewhere earning money and sending it back home
New assumptions mean a new theory
Urban as entity and urban as quality
Basic frameworks to investigate:
Livelihood
Lifestyle - social status, household arrangements,
Connectivity -Of Place, Of People
Place - context and resources, scale independent
As diagrammed in the Ernst Strungmann Forum (Boone et al. 2014: MIT Press)
The Urban-Rural Continuum - As understood through the Baltimore LTER
1) Second homes in rural areas
Purchasing old farm homes as getaways - change the urban AND the rural landscape
2) Distal connections on diets
Australian fruit bats
Metapopulation and metacommunity give us ideas about how cities work and lead us to the idea of
Metacity
- heterogeneity of place
- connectivity of places - exchange
- dynamism of places, livelihood, lifestyle, connectivity
- fine to global scale
We call today's storms unprecedented, but research reveals that it doesn't entirely tell the story (see: 1960 Hurricane Donna in Hell's Kitchen).
Pickett also included a reference to the Great Fire of Baltimore in 1904
Most American cities could be considered Sanitary Cities
But new cities are emerging that follow other models
A few call themselves ecocities, but we should be very wary of the promises behind that
The Baltimore Sustainability Plan
The highway to nowhere
What are the environmental ethics for urban areas?
Recent papers:
Urban Diversity
The Metacity: A Conceptual Framework for Integrating Ecology and Urban Design by McGrath and Pickett
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