Is ecology anti-urban? Urban ideas and imaginaries across one hundred years of ecological publications

Bibliographic Data

ID5100366
AuthorsSilvia Flaminio (0000-0003-2713-9910, Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research, corresponding author), Joëlle Salomon Cavin (0000-0001-7445-7757, University of Lausanne), Marco Moretti (0000-0002-5845-3198, Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research)
Year2023
Volume6
Issue2
Pages923-951
Publication date2023-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnvironment and Planning E Nature and Space (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2514-8486 • E-ISSN: 2514-8494
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/25148486221115949
OpenAlexW4289518096
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited157

This paper investigates urban imaginaries conveyed in publications in ecology over the past century. We examine some urban ecologists' view that urban areas have been disregarded by ecology due to negative views on cities and urbanisation. Inspired by previous work on imaginaries in social and cultural geography and political ecology, and by textual data analysis methods, we adopted a methodological framework that applies both quantitative and qualitative methods in the analysis of a corpus of 960 articles (published 1922-2018) drawn from 10 long-standing international journals in ecology. Our hypothesis is that ecology has embraced an anti-urban imaginary that is manifested in urban invisibility as well as the recurrent expression of negative ideas about cities (constituting an 'anti-urban bias'). Our results partially confirm this hypothesis. We show that until the 1970s only a few papers were published on cities. We identify nine main themes relating to cities around which ideas about cities have been constructed (threats, pests, refuges, fragmentation, gradients, pollution, homogenisation, planetary urbanisation, and planning) and show how these ideas have been mobilised in the articles since the 1920s. We discuss the way in which these evolving ideas reflect a move from an essentially anti-urban imaginary to a more complex and ambivalent one. This shift coincides with the rise of the idea of planetary urbanisation in ecological publications, increasing recommendations regarding urban planning, and more generally, growing conceptual debates on the ecological impact of cities

Biology · Geography · Invisibility · Political ecology · Political science · Politics · Sociology · The Imaginary · Urban ecology · Urban ecosystem · Urban planning · Urbanization · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Land Use and Ecosystem Services · Urban Green Space and Health · Urban Studies · Ecology