As cities sprawl into suburbs and exurbs, the distinction between urban areas and the countryside has become increasingly blurry. A new paper published in npj Urban Sustainability proposes that many modern landscapes can be managed more holistically when they are understood as a mixture of urban, rural, and wild features.
"There used to be a clear boundary between cities relative to the countryside and the wild, but that has been changing for a long time," says lead author Steward Pickett , an urban ecologist and scientist emeritus at Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies . "You can't just walk in a straight line from a city center and define where the 'urban' ends."
Pickett and coauthors put forth a new framework that emphasizes the many connections among urban, rural, and wild places that can create a blend of these features in a given area.
"It's like patchwork or a mosaic," explains Pickett. "You can have a place that's 70% urban and 30% rural right next to a place that's the opposite, or has some wild mixed in." He and his coauthors hope this new way of thinking, which they have dubbed the "continuum of urbanity," helps urban ecologists, planners, and city managers better understand how these areas function and what matters most to residents. The continuum may also be useful to policy experts, engineers, decision makers, and activists.
The paper grew out of a Cary Conference in 2021 and includes four Cary coauthors: Winslow Hansen , Shannon LaDeau , Christopher Solomon , and Elizabeth Cook . Funding came from the National Science Foundation and Cary Institute's Science Innovation Funds .
Connections and mixtures are everywhere
Traditional thinking separates urban and rural (or 'natural') spaces, as well as the research fields that study them. In place of this black and white dichotomy, the new framework offers a middle ground with many shades of gray.
The blending of urban, rural, and wild is everywhere once you know how to look for it, says Pickett. Wild animals such as coyotes and even bears sometimes turn up in towns and cities. Rural influence can be seen in community gardens or a tomato plant growing on a fire escape. There are urban influences in rural areas, too, reflected in the types of jobs people perform and the entertainment they consume.
The paper explores how these dynamics play out in the Mid-Hudson Valley as an example. This region of upstate New York is composed of small cities, towns, farms, and forests. It is physically connected to New York City by the Hudson River, several highways, railways, and more. This connectivity lets people, money, and culture flow between the two locations. For example, asylum seekers (some bused to New York City from southern states) have been housed in hotels in the Mid-Hudson Valley. The COVID-19 pandemic sent many New Yorkers into the Hudson Valley, driving up property prices and threatening to increase development on recently reforested land. The growth of online shopping, intensified by COVID-19, has changed livelihoods and locations in the Mid-Hudson Valley through novel employment opportunities, conversion of land to warehouses and large distribution centers, and the road infrastructure and associated truck traffic to serve them. In another example, the paper shares how, in suburban landscapes, connecting previously fragmented forests has facilitated the spread of blacklegged ticks and Lyme disease.
Global-scale connections can link distant places, too, such as the accidental introduction, via international trade, of forest pests like the emerald ash borer and the spotted lanternfly that are harming Hudson Valley forests. Similarly, the demand for beef in the Hudson Valley can incentivize deforestation for cattle grazing in the Amazon. And as climate change causes more droughts, floods, and fires across New York City and the Hudson Valley, it may continue to reshape the distribution of homes and businesses and the flow of ideas between the region's urban, rural, and wild places.
"The message of the Mid-Hudson River Valley case is that familiar urban and rural features are tightly linked," the authors write in the paper. "One cannot be understood without the other, nor can policies, plans, and interventions neglect the entanglement of the seemingly discrete urban and rural human ecosystem characteristics."
From theory to practice
The authors outline four main areas of life where urban, rural, and wild influence could potentially be measured:
Livelihood: How do people in this community support themselves? People who own or work on farms, for example, will likely experience more rural influence. Urban livelihoods can become part of rural places — for example, when remote workers in the financial sector bring urban resources and expectations to seemingly rural locations.
Lifestyle: How do people identify socially? Who do they consider part of their community? This can be linked to the kinds of houses they live in or the cars they drive, says Pickett. "If you are a farmer who owns a truck and a Mercedes, the Mercedes is something that expresses your social status and connects you with wealthy people way beyond the farm."
Connectivity: How are different parts of the region connected, and how well are they connected? Connectivity goes beyond physical infrastructure. For example, Pickett explains, people living on farms in South Africa may be supported by money flowing from family members working in big cities in South Africa or even the US or Europe.
Location: The specific geography where livelihood, lifestyle, and connectivity interact.
How the continuum of urbanity can help
"We hope that the continuum of urbanity encourages people to slow down and think before they design, build, or renovate," says Pickett. "For example, someone might want to coordinate the traffic lights to reduce traffic and gasoline consumption. That's all well and good, but if you only design your city for efficiency, you're likely to neglect some of the amenities people need for a pleasant, healthy life. Our framework slows you down and makes you ask, 'How's this going to affect how people live, or where they can recreate, or how they can build social relationships?' If your profession is an urban ecologist or an urban designer, an urban planner, or a city manager, you have to be aware of all of these components."
Coauthor and Cary ecologist Shannon LaDeau said she is already incorporating the continuum of urbanity in Defining Urban Biodiversity , a project she co-leads with Scenic Hudson that seeks to understand how changing green spaces in three Hudson Valley cities impacts plants, animals, and people. "The ideas in the paper inform how I think about the urban matrix that links our study sites to each other, to New York City, as well as to ecosystems of the Hudson River and Catskills," she said.
Coauthor Robert Freudenberg , vice president of energy and environmental programs at the Regional Plan Association, said the Continuum of Urbanity approach is helping him move away from oversimplistic categorizations of land and community, to better consider the complex mixtures in the places where he works, especially when planning for climate change.
"The concept provides an extraordinary framework for considering how climate impacts are manifesting within the natural systems that bind the region together," said Freudenberg. "If we are going to plan and manage our way to adapt to climate change, and hopefully avoid its very worst impacts, understanding the ecological interactions that branch across our developed places will be essential."
Cary's Winslow Hansen , coauthor and director of a large collaborative that seeks to reduce the risk of catastrophic fires in the western US, says the continuum of urbanity helps him see an important part of his work in a new way.
"In my current area of work, we think about the wildland urban interface as a distinct boundary between human communities and wild areas as the epicenter of fire risk," says Hansen. "But if you instead embrace a continuum of urbanity, then risk mitigation from fire could become more nuanced, tailored to local ecological and social conditions rather than viewing the world as clearly categorized into one or the other."
There remains much work to do to refine the continuum of urbanity and figure out how to measure the three dimensions. However, the authors hope that the new concept will change the way people think about communities, guiding more thoughtful research and helpful interventions.
Funding
This publication was funded by the US National Science Foundation, the National Science Foundation of China, and the Science Innovation Funds of Cary Institute.
Authors
Steward T. A. Pickett - Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies
Weiqi Zhou - Chinese Academy of Sciences
Daniel L. Childers - Arizona State University
J. Morgan Grove - Yale School of the Environment
Winslow D. Hansen - Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies
Dexter H. Locke - USDA Forest Service
Christopher Boone - University of Southern California
Karen C. Seto - Yale School of the Environment
Dawa Zhaxi - Chinese Academy of Sciences
Shannon LaDeau - Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies
Leonard Nevarez - Vassar College
Robert Freudenberg - Regional Plan Association
Christopher T. Solomon - Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies
Elizabeth M.Cook - Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, Barnard College
Russell Urban-Mead - LaBella Associates
David Maddox - The Nature of Cities
Adam R. Bosch - Hudson Valley Pattern for Progress
---
Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies is an independent nonprofit center for environmental research. Since 1983, our scientists have been investigating the complex interactions that govern the natural world and the impacts of climate change on these systems. Our findings lead to more effective resource management, policy actions, and environmental literacy. Staff are global experts in the ecology of: forests, freshwater, soils, cities, and disease.
