Urban Ecology Strategies for Green Infrastructure and Land Use

This title includes a number of Open Access chapters.

With increasing global urbanization, the environments and ecologies of cities are often perceived to suffer. While pollution and destruction of green space and species may occur, cities also remain part of natural systems. Cities provide natural processes necessary for survival for humans and other living organisms in urban areas. Urban ecology elucidates some of these processes and sheds light on their importance to healthy, fulfilling urban livelihoods.

Urban Ecology: Strategies for Green Infrastructure and Land Use provides background on issues relating to urban ecology and urban natural processes. The first section covers the types, values, and recognition of ecosystem services provided by natural processes in urban areas. The second section details the importance and potential of green spaces in urban areas. The third section focuses on biodiversity traits of cities, and the ways in which urbanization affects biodiversity indicators. Finally, the fourth section covers some of the tools and approaches available for urban planners and designers concerned with improving or maintaining urban environments and the services they provide.

This easily accessible reference volume offers a comprehensive guide to this rapidly growing field. Case studies and up-to-date research provide urban planners with new options for creating cities that will meet the demands of the twenty-first century. Also appropriate for graduate students who are preparing for careers related to urban planning, this compendium captures and integrates the current work being done in this vitally important field.

Kim Etingoff has a master’s degree in urban and environmental policy and planning from Tufts University. Her recent experience includes researching a report on food resiliency within the city of Boston with Initiative for a Competitive Inner City. She worked in partnership with Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative and Alternatives for Community and Environment to support a community food-planning process based in a Boston neighborhood, which was oriented toward creating a vehicle for community action around urban food issues, providing extensive background research to ground the resident-led planning process. She has worked in the Boston Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, and has also coordinated and developed programs in urban agriculture and nutrition education. In addition, she has many years of experience researching, writing, and editing educational and academic books on environmental and food issues.