Ecological sustainability and the urban ecosystem

Although the current literature includes discussions relating to the sustainability of the built human community, planning professions have focused their attention on continued technological solutions to environmental problems. These interventions attempt to stabilize the problem at hand through further technological infusion increasing the gap between the origination of the problem and ecologically sound solutions. Ecological sustainability, however, involves the identification of ecologically sound alternatives to current practices. This paper focuses on an integrated, ecological and engineering approach to analyzing urban systems. Ecological theories are introduced to provide a baseline for a correlation with planning and principles of community development. A connection between these ideological entities establishes a theoretical framework for the development of a spatial modeling technique for the identification of ecological systems in the domesticated urban environment. This will be presented by theorizing the conceptual origins of the term sustainability, briefly describing some theories of ecological thought and ecological applications to urban environments. A new urban patch model is then introduced that relates the ecological concepts of hierarchical patch dynamics theory to the urban environment.