Urbanized Ecosystems: Conceptualization to Application

Abstract

Urban areas are among the largest anthropogenic uses in terms of appropriation of land, energy, materials, and biological primary production, as well as in the alteration of the biogeochemical cycles of carbon, water, and nitrogen. Despite their significance in these respects, coherent descriptions and analyses of urban areas regarding the flux and cyclic processes of energy, materials, information and costs are relatively scarce. There exists an opportunity to investigate urban areas as analogous to ecosystems, thus allowing a complex, dynamical systems approach to be applied to the planning and management of built environments. Similar to how an ecologist studies natural environments within the hierarchal scale of an ecosystem, this novel approach is based on the investigation of urban areas as ecosystems onto themselves, or as urbanized ecosystems . Such an approach is scalable and transferable to neighborhoods, communities and regional applications. The intent of this paper is to conceptualize urbanized ecosystems within a socio-ecological framework, so as to provide a basis for informed decision- and policymaking. Towards this end, this paper presents a methodology, Urbanized Ecosystemsâ„¢ (UrbEcoSysâ„¢), developed as a proof of concept application for the Village of Oak Park, Illinois in 2009. This community was first conceptualized as a complex, dynamical ecosystem, based on scoping, inventorying, and assessing its critical variables and relationships as represented by the flux and cyclic processes of energy, materials, costs, and information. This conceptualization allowed a more formalized level of inquiry in the form of a system model. Findings in the form of baseline metrics were then used to develop alternative policy scenarios, which were then assessed relative to their alignment with the village's overall vision and policy. The outcomes from this assessment could then be used to support an informed decision- and policymaking process, prioritized within the municipal budget's allocation of finite resources.