Define urban ecology and discuss the various urban ecology theories.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answers will vary. Urban ecology studies the relationships between people and urban environments. Over the years, social scientists have revised urban ecology theories.Sociologists Robert Park and Ernest Burgess proposed concentric zone theory. According to this model, a city grows outward from a central point in a series of rings. The innermost ring, the central business district, is surrounded by a zone of transition, which contains industry and poor-quality housing. The third and fourth rings have housing for the working and middle classes. The outermost ring is occupied by people who live in the suburbs and commute daily to work in the central business district.Economist Homer Hoyt's sector theory refined concentric zone theory. He proposed that cities develop in sectors (instead of rings) that radiate from the central business district depending on various economic and social activities. Some sectors are predominantly industrial, some contain stores and offices, and others, generally farther away from the central business district, are middle- and upper-class residential areas.Geographers Chauncey Harris and Edward Ullman developed another influential model, multiple nuclei theory, which proposed that a city contains more than one center around which activities revolve. For example, a "minicenter" often includes an outlying business district with stores and offices that are accessible to middle- and upper-class residential neighborhoods, whereas airports typically attract hotels and warehouses.As cities grew after World War II, these models no longer described urban spaces. Thus, Harris proposed a peripheral theory of urban growth, which emphasized the development of suburbs around a city but away from its center.As suburbs and edge cities burgeon, highways that link the city's central business district to outlying areas and beltways that loop around the city provide relatively easy access to airports, the downtown, and surrounding areas.