Opportunities for urban ecology in community and regional planning

Our species plans. That’s who we are: plan makers. We rely on knowledge, instincts, and gut reactions to guide our decisions. Good plans rely on a careful reading of a place or a situation. Plans require context. Ecology, especially urban ecology, can contribute much to an understanding of place and context in city and regional planning. Planning theorists have connected what we know to what we do. For instance, John Friedmann (1987) suggested knowledge should lead to action, while Patrick Geddes (1915) placed diagnosis before treatment. Ecological knowledge can contribute much to the diagnosis of a place before a planning or design intervention is undertaken. Furthermore, plans should be flexible and capable of adjusting to changing circumstances and new information. From nature, we know that it is neither always the strongest of species that survives nor the most intelligent. Rather, it is the species that is most adaptable to change (this is a paraphrase of a quote often misattributed to Charles Darwin. I first saw it on a t-shirt at the Charles Darwin Research Station gift shop in the Galapagos Islands. Even though Charles Darwin never proclaimed this, the idea still rings true.) We humans are an adaptive species. Planning is among our most powerful tools for adaptation. Planning is simply thinking ahead. Community and regional planning involves thinking ahead and formally envisioning the future for ourselves and others. These two scales—community and regional—suggest planners deal with both close-knit groups and larger populations. Environmental and social concerns are equally important at both scales. Like planners, ecologists work at many scales from sites to landscapes on to regions. Ecology can be useful for the future of our planet through what has been called, “earth stewardship” (Ogden et al. 2013; Sayre et al. 2013) as a result of planning and urban design (Felson, …