Urban ecology (re)defined

Indy Skyline White River

by Tim Carter

I’m really excited for the day when Google develops a retina-mounted camera…something that can capture people’s immediate responses to things you say to them. Whenever I tell people I work at the Center for Urban Ecology (CUE) at Butler University, they look as if they just heard that a new planet was discovered or found out that their cousin is trying out for American Idol.

Kind of awkwardly happy and interested but not sure what it really means or what to say next.

So, for all of you out there who have given me that look in the past, here’s an attempt to give three points about what urban ecology means for us here at the CUE (pronounced Q):

  1. The city is an ecosystem.
    The city is an ecosystem that includes all the living and non-living things as part of it. This includes humans, plants, water, buildings, and everything else that is here. We don’t treat humans as separate from their environments. In fact, understanding how humans work is really important to understanding how the urban ecosystem works.
  2. Humans are important.
    Ecology is a discipline that studies living and nonliving things and the interactions between those things. Many ecologists study interactions that “drive” the ecosystem, such as how much solar energy it takes to make plants grow, what the temperature changes are during the year in an area, and what food is available for animals to eat. In a city, many of these drivers are uniquely dominant such as human culture, legislative and regulatory influences, and socio-economic factors. To understand urban ecology all of the drivers, including the human ones, must be considered important.
  3. The future can be better than the past.
    It’s true that the humans’ relationship with non-humans is not a healthy one, either historically or presently. In many ways this relationship is fundamentally broken as our species acts, not surprisingly, in very self-serving ways. In no place is this relationship more profoundly dysfunctional than in cities. What this doesn’t mean, however, is that our past or current activities will necessarily determine our future ones. Human self-reflection may be our strongest asset in developing future urban ecosystems that don’t look like the past. Human innovation and creativity, while not a panacea, leads us at the CUE to be optimistic rather than fatalistic about urban futures.

The CUE is working here in Indianapolis to improve our city. My hope is that through our projects we can inspire others to view cities as opportunities for creative restoration…and I can throw away my Google glasses in the meantime.

Tim Carter is director of the Center for Urban Ecology at Butler University.