Oral Abstract Details

Author(s):
Michael Iversen

Affiliation:
University of Illinois at Chicago

Presentation Type:
Oral

Topic Area:
Application of ecological research in land-use planning

Abstract Text:
Urbanization is the defining ecological phenomenon of the twenty-first century. Urban areas are among the largest anthropogenic uses in terms of appropriation of land, energy, materials, and biological primary production, as well as in the alteration of the biogeochemical cycles of carbon, water, and nitrogen. Despite their significance in these respects, coherent descriptions and analyses of urban areas regarding the flux and cyclic processes of energy, materials, information and costs are relatively scarce. There exists an opportunity to investigate urban areas as analogous to ecosystems, thus allowing a complex systems approach to be applied to the planning and management of built environments. Similar to how an ecologist studies natural environments within the hierarchal scale of an ecosystem, this novel approach is based on the investigation of urban areas as ecosystems onto themselves, or as urbanized ecosystems. Such an approach is scalable and transferable to neighborhoods, communities and regional applications. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has long since recognized the important role of ecological science in furthering the understanding of urbanized ecosystems as evidenced by the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Program. As such, LTER created a socio-ecological theoretical framework that provided the basis for narrowscope research questions to be nested within each other, allowing one to proceed from broadscope to increasingly more narrowscope questions. Following this hierarchical progression, the intent of this presentation is to conceptualize urbanized ecosystems within this socio-ecological framework, so as to provide a basis for informed planning and policymaking. From this conceptualization, the investigation focuses on how does one model an urbanized ecosystem in terms of its associated energy, material, monetary, and information fluxes and relative to various temporal and spatial scales, so as to provide a basis for informed decision- and policymaking. Towards this end, this presentation presents a methodology, Urbanized Ecosystems™ (UrbEcoSys™), developed as a proof of concept application for the Village of Oak Park, IL, which was modeled as a dynamic and interrelating complex ecosystem. The extent of this 2009 study was based on scoping, inventorying, and assessing Oak Park’s critical variables and relationships, as represented by the flux and cyclic processes of energy, materials, costs, and information. The resultant system model conceptualized the Village of Oak Park as an urbanized ecosystem, so as to allow a more formalized level of inquiry. From this conceptualization, baseline metrics and alternative scenarios were developed relative to their alignment with the village’s overall sustainable vision and policy. The intent was to support and enhance an informed decision- and policymaking process, which then could be prioritized within the municipal budget’s allocation of finite revenue and expenditures.