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Tuesday, March 31, 2015

A Late Night Paragraph on Urban Ecology

Ecology as a scientific discipline was developed in the 19th Century by investigators with urban affiliations who often inclined towards the wilder places of nature. Indeed, despite the pronounced urban institutional setting for the development of ecology in the 20th Century there was a surprising paucity of reference to towns or cities in the literature of the discipline until the final decades of last century.

Since that time, however, the growth of urban ecology as an vibrant sub-discipline has been quite remarkable. Urban ecology developed both by the adaptation of classical ecological ideas to urban locations but also by the cultivation of novel ecological ideas specially proposed to understand urban patterns. Some of this novel theorizing admittedly drew inspiration from social theory elaborated in the early 20th Century.

As recently as the last few years, some of urban ecology’s indigenous theorizing, is being applied to understand phenomena in arenas remote from cities. This perhaps marks a significant maturation of urban ecology.

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