As cities sprawl into suburbs and exurbs, the distinction between urban areas and the countryside has become increasingly blurry. A new paper published in npj Urban Sustainability proposes that many modern landscapes can be managed more holistically when they are understood as a mixture of urban, rural, and wild features.
“There used to be a clear boundary between cities relative to the countryside and the wild, but that has been changing for a long time,” says lead author Steward Pickett, an urban ecologist and scientist emeritus at Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies. “You can’t just walk in a straight line from a city center and define where the ‘urban’ ends.”
Pickett and coauthors put forth a new framework that emphasizes the many connections among urban, rural, and wild places that can create a blend of these features in a given area.
“It’s like patchwork or a mosaic,” explains Pickett. “You can have a place that's 70% urban and 30% rural right next to a place that's the opposite, or has some wild mixed in.” He and his coauthors hope this new way of thinking, which they have dubbed the “continuum of urbanity,” helps urban ecologists, planners, and city managers better understand how these areas function and what matters most to residents. The continuum may also be useful to policy experts, engineers, decision makers, and activists.
The paper grew out of a Cary Conference in 2021 and includes four Cary coauthors: Winslow Hansen, Shannon LaDeau, Christopher Solomon, and Elizabeth Cook. Funding came from the National Science Foundation and Cary Institute’s Science Innovation Funds.
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