Week 6: Urban Ecology

This week in class, we talked about the layout of a city as well as the many systems within a city and how they resemble very closely the systems that occur naturally in nature. We discussed the spatial structure of a city. This includes the spatial distribution of the population, the distribution of real estate prices, and the distribution of wages and incomes over space. We looked at how the population was distributed throughout a city and the reasons behind this distribution. The primary reason being that density gradients flatten with income.  This means that the majority of the people in any major city live just a few kilometers from the city center due to the fact that land rent values increase toward the center of a highly urbanized area. A paper that discusses many of these points can be found at http://alain-bertaud.com/AB_Files/Spatia_%20Distribution_of_Pop_%2050_%20Cities.pdf .

               

Another subject of our class discussions this week was urban ecology or a field that deals with the interaction between organisms in an urbanized community and the community itself. We talked about how cities are similar in many ways to nature in the sense that the flow of matter and energy through the ecosystem is comparable to the way that they move through a city or urban community. A blog dedicated to urban ecology and learning about and education residents about their community and their physical environment can be found at http://blog.urbanecology.org/ .