The urban environment is a dynamic interaction between the natural environment and human

culture.
The urban habitat is probably the most diverse and internally variegated landscape in which
many species live. It has a whole series of niches, within, beneath, between and above the
complex buildings and other structures that make up urban areas.
Towns and cities are the places where nature is most modified by human action. An urban area
can be seen either as a single system or as a hierarchy of nested systems from individual
parcels of woodland, garden and wasteland to factory compounds, office complexes or
individual dwellings. This has led to many interpretations of cities as ecosystems.
In urban areas, we are not dealing with isolated systems cut off from external influences, but
with open systems involving the transfer of both energy and matter with their surroundings. All
biological systems have this characteristic. They require energy to operate and nutrients in
order to exist.
Towns and cities rely on resources from other areas. Most are linked by infrastructure to deliver
water and energy, to provide access for transport and relay communications and to protect
against environmental extremities.
Urban metabolism is a framework using an organic analogy for studying the interactions of
natural and human systems in specific regions. It uses equations and models to describe and
analyze the flow of materials (water, food, and construction materials) and energy into and
within cities.
The material flow analysis (MFA), developed in industrial ecology in early 1990s, measures
materials flow into a system, the stocks and flows within it, and the outputs from the system to
the other systems in the form of pollution, waste or exports (Baccini and Brunner, 1991).
The metaphor of cities as giant organisms has a long history and is still often used. William
Cobbett (1830) wrote disparagingly of London as a monster spreading its tentacles further and
further across the countryside, seeking more and more food, building material, land, and other
resources to meet the needs of a growing population. Sabine Barles (2007) has shown most
elegantly how nitrogen is brought into Paris from the surrounding countryside in the form of food
and then recycled back on to the farms as wastes and residues. Many others have linked urban
demands for resources and labor to the metabolism of an organism (Wolman 1965), including

seeing cities as multi-faceted organisms (Eliot Hurst 1975) or as less than pure economic
organism (Sternlieb and Hughes 1975).
Urban production functions involve a metabolism that can be visualized in terms of towns and
cities as biologically being consumers in their use of the vital resources of air, water and food, in
urban metabolism. The single organism view helps in appreciating the demands cities place on
other ecosystems.
It is relevant to say that the metabolism of cities is somewhat like that of an organism. Cities are
not living organisms in the biological sense, but they do grow, produce (or rather transform)
energy, consume the resources and they do eliminate wastes.
The five broad factors influencing the use of energy and materials in cities: (1) the location,
terrain and natural attributes of the urban area; (2) the main functions and productive activities
of the agglomeration; (3) the purchasing power of the inhabitants; (4) urban policy and
management factors; and (5) urban planning and design choices.
These interactions are also at the core of the concept of sustainability that rests on the three
pillars of economic, environmental and social sustainability. These three pillars show
environmental sustainability or good urban ecosystem conditions, normally have to go hand in
hand with good economic conditions and stable social situations.
The urban ecosystem operates as a complex system involving the biosphere (plants and
animals), the pedosphere (soils), the lithosphere (rocks), the hydrosphere (the water), the
atmosphere (gases) and the anthroposphere (politics, economics, administration, civic
participation, planning and demographics), with inputs and outputs to and from the global
environment around the city and many internal feedback loops.
The socio-economic system view represents a considerable advance on the pre- 1970 accounts
of urban areas as input- output devices driven entirely by human planning, technology and
political decisions. In the 1970s, people recognized that the problems of urban areas might be
understood better if they treated the city as a system, or as part of a wider regional ecosystem.
Stearns and Montag (1974) argued that while the urban ecosystem approach might not solve all
the urban problems, its logical thought processes would reveal the actual complexity of cities
and how urban planning, decision- making, management and research all require
interdisciplinary teamwork. Such an effort, it was claimed, would help people meet present and
future needs without continual destruction and degradation of land, water and the atmosphere.

In other words, considering towns and cities as ecosystems would offer a pathway towards
sustainability.
Pioneers of this approach were the study of Sydney as a life system by the Ecological society of
Australia (Nix 1972), the UNESCO Man and Biospheres Urban Programme (Di Castri et al.
1981), and the analysis of Hong Kong that stemmed from the UNESCO work (Boyden et al.
1981). By the beginning of the 21st century, looking at towns and cities as ecosystems had
become well established and several detailed urban ecosystem studies had begun.
Ecosystem dynamics are driven by patterns and processes associated with biotic and abiotic
factors (including climate and mineral cycling). Humans contribute to these patterns and
processes by using land and natural resources, producing waste and changing communities
(the plants and animals) (Grimm et al. 2008) Interactions between humans and natural systems
can form positive and negative feedback loops (Liu et al. 2007). Positive (unregulated) feedback
loops are associated with the over exploitation of natural resources. Negative (self-regulating)
feedback loops are more common and can involve changes in policy brought about to address
the decline in an iconic species or habitat, or other forms of conservation of natural resources
and values of nature.