Abstract
Cities (including megacities) involve human-mediated disturbance that can be comprehended as primary landscape transformation. Primary landscape transformation in historical ecology involves physical, social, and economic changes resulting from highly anthropically modified terrain, including its vegetation cover, faunal abundance, drainage features, soil composition, and microbial diversity. Cities also exhibit secondary landscape transformations, such as urban gardens. These are partial changes in species content and substrate to areas already modified by primary landscape transformation, or not modified at all. Primary and secondary landscape transformations in relation to cities can be further subdivided into two basic types: (1) where species numbers decrease and (2) where species numbers increase. It is a useful means of typologizing the complexity of cities and by extension, megacities. Societal complexity, whether hierarchical or as in network theory diffuse, is tangible in urban landscapes, which are more or less diverse in species numbers. It does not necessarily involve species extinctions, which often occur outside cityscapes. Applied historical ecology has the potential to contribute to a reduction of trends in species extinctions in zones outside the city, because of lessons learned from past primary landscape transformations. Applied historical ecology in the context of cities, megacities, and the zones that surround them can be incorporated into a global project of new conservation.
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Notes
- 1.
Cities have been called fourth magnitude settlements, using base 10, where 104 = 10,000; similarly, towns are third magnitude settlements (with c. 1000 people) and villages are second magnitude settlements (with c. 100 people) (Wilkinson [2016], Appendix A).
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Balée, W. (2021). Historical Ecology of Societal Nucleation and Collapse. In: Muramatsu, S., McGee, T.G., Mori, K. (eds) Living in the Megacity: Towards Sustainable Urban Environments. Global Environmental Studies. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-56901-5_3
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