What is a City?

If we are going to talk about urban ecology it makes sense to start off with a brief discussion of what an urban area is. It can be easy to tell that you are looking at a city when you are standing atop St. Peter’s Basilica (like the above photo my girlfriend took). Yet, this is not always an easy task because there are no strict cutoffs to describe what a city/urban area is. I’m not sure if it falls into same definition category as the Supreme Court’s of pornography– “I don’t know how to define it, but I know it when I see it” but no single definition captures it all. So I will try to get at it by committee.

The Oxford English Dictionary goes this route too. Under the definition for city there are six headings with a dozen sub entries. It gives the extremely useful definition that a city is “a town or other inhabited place” and then goes on to talk about the history of the word (coming from the Romans and civitas, then cités in France, and arriving in the England in the 13th century as cité replacing burh and boroughs). Wikipedia does a better job, giving this definition for a city as “an urban settlement with a particularly important status that differentiates it from a town.” Mostly definitions are dominated by the legal terms used to define cities and these vary by country and state. For example in the UK a city “is a town which has been known as a city since time immemorial, or which has received city status by letters patent”. In the USA the designation of city is a matter of state law and more of it has to do with form of government (Mayor or city council) than population. So there are giant cities like NY or LA, medium cities like Nashville or Albuquerque and then even Maza, North Dakota the smallest city in America with a whopping population of five.

Urban areas seem to have a more coherent definition. That naturally stems from urban areas having more intrinsic properties than the colloquial definitions of cities. Wikipedia gives the definition to be “an area with an increased density of human-created structures in comparison to the areas surrounding it”. In general the density for urban areas needs to be about 400 people per square kilometer. The US Census Bureau defines urban area and urban clusters as core areas that have population densities of 1,000 people per square mile surrounded by areas that have population densities of 500 people per square mile.

I think the average person knows when they are in a city or not. And thats what’s most important, having your own definition or description. For some its tall buildings. For others its sidewalks and Starbucks. Car alarms, hot dog vendors, pigeon poop, or waiting in traffic. Being able to indentify an urban area from a rural one is pretty natural. For myself I define an urban area as one in which human beings dominate the landscape. Its not a clear definition, but I know it when I see it.

Mountaintop Mining of Coal Must Go

So what are you doing reading this blog right now? Or better to ask, what should you be doing right now instead of reading this blog?

Lets admit it: we spend a lot more time than we should reading stories on the internet or watching the ever hilarious videos (such as the all time classic Bear + Trampoline = Comdey) instead of doing work. I mean who are your bosses kidding giving you a computer with a connection to the vast world wide web and thinking that you are not going to read about a New Zealand man claiming that he got raped by a wombat. If you are like Peter from Office Space, in a given week you probably do about fifteen minutes of real actual work in a week. So I figured if you are just cruising around on the internet superhighway why not give you something a little better to read than the latest pop culture Spears/Hilton/Lohan trash. So early each week I will try to highlight some new cool science finding or show you a cool website that explains some environmental issue. Often many of these will involve a cause or a non-profit group that you can support. So hopefully it will give you something to talk about around the water cooler that makes you look a little smarter.

So to start off I want to share with you this cool website: ilovemountains.org .

This website has been designed to alert people to the horrors of mountaintop removal. This is an incredibly destructive way for coal companies to get coal out of the Appalachian Mountains. Alan Weisman in The World Without Us said coal companies – “discovered a trick cheaper than tunneling or even strip mining: just pulverize the entire top third of a mountain, sluice out the coal with a few million gallons of water, push what’s left over the side, and blast again.” Not only does this destroy the entire mountain, but the tailings are then pushed into the valleys filling them up and polluting the streams. The rich biodiversity of the region is not the only loss; many people are being displaced eroding the cultural diversity of Appalachia region.

A New View

Hello world! Or at least the five people (not counting my mother) who are reading this blog. This is akin to an experiment for me. As part of my science communication class one task was to create a blog about science / your research. Having never had a blog before I am 1) entering into the 21st century seven years late and 2) hopefully keeping one step ahead of my father in the technology race (we had a long race to see who would be the last person without a cellphone and I barely beat him). So bare with me as I try out this new medium for expression. I normally express myself in densely worded papers that get printed in obscure scientific journals or late at night after too many beers—both not effective means of disseminating clear and convincing ideas.

So a little about myself. I am a graduate student at Cornell University (or as I like to say a small school in NY) in the Department of Natural Resources. I am 25 years old, grew up on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, went down south for my undergraduate in biology at Wofford College, and some how found a back door way into a prestigious school (I am in what I call “the Ivy League for Dummies” part). Broadly I study invasive species, which are non-native plants and animals that cause environmental or economic harm. Maybe you have heard of things like Kudzu, Snakeheads, or Zebra Mussels. Being green I guess it was only natural I focused on the plant part. A lot of my research focuses on how human land use influences plant community composition and biological invasions. So I study how your neighborhood, farm, city, favorite mall, or forest influence what plants grow where. So I spend a lot of time out in the field looking for and counting plants (something my brother has repeatedly stated shouldn’t take that long or be hard since plants don’t move!). When I am not in the field I am probably in front of my computer (probably getting cancer) reading papers, entering in data, or surfing the web for useless information. I also spend a lot of time in the library and in a greenhouse (which is nice in the winter). Besides school I love to hike and backpack, am nuts about bicycles, listen to music, read non-science books, and hang out with friends over beers.

Enough boring background about me. Now lets get into what I hope will be an interesting and enlightening discussion about cities. Over the course of my research and travels I have become more and more interested in cities. Growing up in a rural area with mostly farms (first traffic light in town came in the late 1990s), cities were a mixture of both excitement and loathing. Big, bustling, and dynamic they had everything that a person could want. Except maybe for trees, a bay to fish in, or a meadow to talk a long walk through. I saw them as areas apart from nature, so I really cherished living with woods and streams around my home. But that vision began to change as I became more aware about ecosystems and how humans interact with nature. Was nature defined as places without humans or are humans another part of this biologically diverse planet? Can a city be more environmentally friendly than a small house in the country? How do people in cities interact with nature and what species live there? As I was pondering these questions and my point of view so were many scientists. For hundreds of years ecologists had focused on the studying the “wildest” and most “natural” places on earth trying to find explanations for natural phenomenon. As I grew so did a burgeoning awareness that cities are their own type of ecosystems. With this new perspective urban ecology came to be.