Cities and geodiversity: coexistence of humans and abiotic nature in urban territories

Abstract

Urbanization is an irreversible global process. Natural elements and systems present in city territories or at non-city sites attend to the demands for natural assets from urbanization processes. Renewed attention to the impacts of the urban organization of societies is essential to promote the harmonious survival of urbanization with natural processes. Although the presence of humans on the planet represents just a small fraction of the Earth’s history, human agglomeration in cities has caused impacts on a global scale. Cities demand services and products from natural areas that are sometimes located in faraway rural areas, affecting geological environments such as beaches, rivers and aquifers, and other processes such as hydrological cycles or atmospheric circulation. The anthropogenic impact on urban catchment areas may induce unexpected environmental degradation in urban areas that affects the hydrological cycle. Although relative newcomers in terms of the Earth’s lifetime, cities are a privileged human habitat, with intrinsic maintenance mechanisms that form the basis of the modern organization of the world’s societies and economies. The present article adopts a geological perspective and a land ethic paradigm to discuss alternatives for a harmonious existence between cities and abiotic nature.