Geog. 309: Urban Environmental Pollution Lecture 1- The Urban Ecosystem

1. Geog. 309: Urban Environmental Pollution Lecture 1- The Urban Ecosystem “Cities are nodes of man’s greatest impact on nature, the places where he has most altered the essential resources of land, air, organisms, and water.” -Marcus and Detwyler, Urbanization and Environment

2. The Urban Ecosystem City: A special combination of a place and its people Urban place: (similar to city): the space occupied by a city. Urban area: a group of coalescent cities or the space occupied by them. Urbanization: process of city establishment and growth; the term commonly connotes population increases in the city, resulting from both internal growth and immigration, as well as spatially expansion of the city. Environment: the aggregate of external conditions that influence the life of an individual or a population, specifically the life of man. Includes physical and cultural components. Cultural components: encompasses the totality of man’s way of living built up by a human group and transmitted from one generation or group to another.

3. The city consists of two components: urban man and urban environment Ecosystem: the organisms of a locality together with their related environment, considered as a unit. The urban ecosystem is also subject to the principle of environmental unity: all the elements and processes of environment are interrelated and interdependent, and that a change in one will lead to changes in the others.

4. Three self-evident interactions in an urban ecosystem • (1) urbanization involves a modification of the environment; • (2) physical environment may influence the form, functions, and growth of the city; and • (3) continuous feedback occurs in the city between man, cultural, and physical environments.

5. The city is an open system: not self-contained; it cannot operate independently and in isolation from other parts of the world. • positive and negative feedback: Positive feedback : is vicious circle or deviation amplification; changes occur in the same direction at a compounding rate. Example: Population-modernization-migration-population Negative feedback: equilibrating; dampen fluctuations in the system and maintain a stead state. Example: Population-air pollution-discomfort and disease-mortality

6. Urban environment is divided into two classes: • cultural (formed by man; it comprises the external cultural attributes of a given community); and • physical subsystem (nature’s elements; exist whether or not man is one on the scene The role of environment in the urban ecosystem can be shown by a schematic representation of feedback loops resulting from interaction of the environmental and cultural subsystem (a) Population-modernization-migration-population (increase) (b) Population-air pollution-discomfort and disease-copulation-population (decrease)

7. The requirements of urban man: • Biological and cultural requirements: -Air, water, space, energy (food and heat), shelter, waster disposal -Political organization,economic system (including labor, capital, materials, and power), technology, transportation and communication, education and information, social and intellectual activities (including recreation, cultural facilities, religion, sense of community), safety.

8. Fig 1. Inputs and Outputs in an Urban Ecosystem

9. Table 1: The Metabolism of Greater London  Amount per year

10. Table 2. Wastes

11. Figure 2. Urban Energy Production

12. Tremendous resource input into a modern city: • The average urban dweller in the united states uses about 150 gallons of water (directly or indirectly), 4 pounds of food, and 19 pounds of fossil fuels each day • Each American consumes 1,400 pounds of steel, travels 5,300 miles between cities, receives 400 pieces of mail, and makes 700 telephone calls per year; and in an average day, city’s inputs are converted into 120 gallons of sewage per person, 4 pounds of refuse per capita, and 1.9 pounds of air pollutants per inhabitant (outputs)

13. Four spheres of physical environment 1. lithologic environment: solid, nonliving portion of the earth; including landforms, bedrock, and soil 2. atmospheric environment: the gaseous envelope of air (and suspended small solid and liquid aerosols) that surrounds the earth 3. hydrologic environment: consisting of the water portion of the earth 4. Biological environment: living things. http://www.classzone.com/books/earth_science/terc/content/investigations/es0103/es0103page02.cfm

14. Table 3. Population, Land Area, and Density for the 20 Largest Cities: 1990

15. Table 4: Urban Population by Region, 2000-2030 Total increase Major area, region and country 2000 2030 2000-2030 World 2,845,049 4,889,393 2,044,344.0 More developed regions 902,993 1,009,808 106,815.0 (percent) 31.7 20.7 5.2 Less developed regions 1,942,056 3,879,585 1,937,529.0 (percent) 68.3 79.3 94.8 Least developed countries 167,421 527,162 359,741.0 (percent) 5.9 10.8 17.6 Total World Population 6,055,049 8,111,980 Percent Urban 47.0 60.3 Source: UN 2000. World Urbanization Prospects, 1998 Revisions, Electronic Files