Abstract
Urban residential expansion increasingly drives land use, land cover and ecological changes worldwide, yet social science theories explaining such change remain under-developed. Existing theories often focus on processes occurring at one scale, while ignoring other scales. Emerging evidence from four linked U.S. research sites suggests it is essential to examine processes at multiple scales simultaneously when explaining the evolution of urban residential landscapes. Additionally, focusing on urbanization dynamics across multiple sites with a shared research design may yield fruitful comparative insights. The following processes and social-hierarchical scales significantly influence the spatial configurations of residential landscapes: household-level characteristics and environmental attitudes; formal and informal institutions at the neighborhood scale; and municipal-scale land-use governance. While adopting a multi-scale and multi-site approach produces research challenges, doing so is critical to advancing understanding of coupled socio-ecological systems and associated vulnerabilities in a dynamic and environmentally important setting: residential landscapes.
Highlights
Social structures, local decisions and ecological factors interact in complex ways to shape urban environments at multiple scales
Within the US, losses of agricultural and forested land to urban and suburban use are among the greatest sources of anthropogenic landscape change in the 20th century, a concern intensified by the large ecological footprints of urban areas as they mobilize resource, commodity and material flows affecting agricultural, forested and other nonurban landscapes (Munroe et al 2005)
This paper presents a multi-scalar approach to the study of residential landscapes, grounding theories of urban and residential land use within a set of illustrative vignettes from four long-term socio-ecological research projects
Summary
Roy Chowdhury, Rinku; Larson, Kelli; Grove, Morgan; Polsky, Colin; Cook, Elizabeth; Onsted, Jeffrey; and Ogden, Laura (2011) "A Multi-Scalar Approach to Theorizing Socio-Ecological Dynamics of Urban Residential Landscapes," Cities and the Environment (CATE): Vol 4: Iss. 1, Article 6. A Multi-Scalar Approach to Theorizing Socio-Ecological Dynamics of Urban Residential Landscapes. Emerging evidence from four linked U.S research sites suggests it is essential to examine processes at multiple scales simultaneously when explaining the evolution of urban residential landscapes. While adopting a multi-scale and multi-site approach produces research challenges, doing so is critical to advancing understanding of coupled socio-ecological systems and associated vulnerabilities in a dynamic and environmentally important setting: residential landscapes. Keywords Urban ecology, Land cover, Household decision-making, Institutions, Coupled socio-ecological systems, Residential landscapes
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