Lisa Benton-Short and John Rennie Short (2008) have published a book in the Routledge series, “Critical Introductions to Urbanism and the City.”
Titled Cities and Nature, the book consists of three major sections: I. The Urban Environment in History; II. Urban Environmental Issues; and III. (Re)aligning Urban-Nature Relations. Within this broad scope, general issues of global trends and conditions of urbanization, the status of urban ecology, various forms of contamination and vulnerability, environmental justice, and sustainability are addressed.
Of particular interest to the LTER community is the fact that the book uses insights from BES work and frameworks, and notes the contribution of our Long-Term Ecological Research project to building contemporary urban ecological research. Indeed, both BES and the Central Arizona Phoenix LTER sites are described in a text box. The linking of social and biophysical approaches is noted as one of our contributions, helping to balance the traditional bias of urban research primarily toward the social.
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