The urban region: natural systems in our place, our nourishment, our home range, our future

Abstract

Consider dividing the land into two parts...urbanized areas and rural/remote areas. Urban planning sometimes achieves heroic successes both small and large where people are concentrated, but has little interest in the much-larger rural/remote land areas with dispersed people. Meanwhile conservation and other resource planners also achieve large and small miracles, but generally only where people are few. To sustainably mesh both nature and us on land requires seriously linking the two broad approaches, and later the emergence of a new integrated expertise. The concept of an urban region looks especially promising. Indeed, ‘‘Natural systems in our place, our nourishment, our home range, and our future,’’ serves as the philosophic framework for the ideas here. Humans have just crossed a threshold. We’ve entered the urban century: worldwide more of us live in urban areas than in rural areas. Steward Pickett points out that Homo sapiens is now an urban species. The city and its interdependent peri-urban/suburban area is our address, our place. Certainly the region provides nourishment. Daily benefits from cultural institutions, clean water supply, diverse recreational spots, local market-gardened food, employment opportunity, shopping galore, and our ever-diverse communities and neighbors are pervasive. The urban region is also our yearly home range. Repeated routes provide spatial integrity and attachment, strengthening our sense of place. Yet the other big story is where we are in the steep part of the J-shaped exponential urban-population curve. In a mere generation, by 2030, UNPD data indicate that today’s three billion urban people will become five billion. Lest we dismiss that as simply a problem of the two dozen megacities, the numerous dispersed smaller cities of 250–500 thousand neighbors have the really rapid growth rates. Moreover the urban poor are the fastest growing. Today’s billion low-income urban inhabitants are expected to double to two billion in a generation. Among the cascade of implications, poverty is really bad for the environment. In whatever form, these urban regions are increasingly our life, and our future. Some urban regions display greatness, from engineering marvel to cultural center, urban agriculture, economic engine, or greenspace system. Imagine the environmental degradation and societal ramifications if people were evenly distributed across the land rather than aggregated in urban regions. Yet rapidly we have created for civilization one of the great challenges of history. A huge city population depends daily and fundamentally on resources which are out of sight, out of the city. Natural Many of the specific ideas here are explored in: Forman, R. T. T. Urban Regions: Ecology and Planning Beyond the City. Cambridge University Press, New York (in press).