Browsing by Subject "Urban ecology"
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Item The city of living garbage : improvisational ecologies of Austin, Texas(2010-05) Webel, Scott Michael; Stewart, Kathleen, 1953-; Ali, Kamran A.; Hartigan, John; Davis, Janet M.; Stone, Allucqu�re R.“The city of living garbage” tours private houses in Austin transformed by their inhabitants into quasi-public places – art environments and permaculture systems made possible by urban waste. The creators of these micro-utopias collect and improvise with salvaged materials like roadside junk, greywater, unwanted animals, and half-forgotten cultural forms to cultivate habitats where undervalued things flourish. They revalue waste through a variety of practices like caring for, teaching, learning, enjoying, and tinkering. Becoming part of these relational patterns is a way to slow down and find wonder and pleasure in the ordinary, but also to act on ecological problems in the larger world. The landscape patches that emerge are lively but vulnerable assemblages that artists, activists, and their nonhuman allies belong to as local characters. By being open for tours, the places loosely connect publics that share modes of attention set on urban natures, salvageable garbage, and vernacular aesthetics. These informal institutions, non-profits, and vulnerable for-profit businesses are caught up in Austin’s current sustainable and cultural development strategies, but also share in an informal economy through their use of valueless wastes. Some articulate with contemporary localization movements that seek to reconfigure water, food, and energy production to decrease their precarious dependence on globalized economies. Others refuse the boundary between art and everyday life by recasting houses as never-ending aesthetic projects. Similarly, as wildlife habitats and urban gardens, they are thriving examples of cultivated places that disrupt an assumed antithesis between cities and ecosystems. These embodied critiques or dreams are small-scale manifestations of what urban natures might become. Borrowing from Deleuze & Guattari, Haraway, Latour, and Thrift, I attend to these places’ ecological and aesthetic relational dynamics that communicate directly through bodies, senses, and forms. This non-representational approach recognizes the contributions of nonhuman agents like plants, animals, microbes, and machines in composing affective landscapes. The writing strives to be a mode of research that is isomorphic with the phenomena it describes. It is impelled by a love of the places, people, and beings it researches; it aspires to preserve a little bit of them by redoubling their presence in the world.Item Connecting backyard wildlife habitats in Austin, TX : case study of Wildlife Austin(2009-12) Koone, Emily Anna; Dooling, SarahUrbanization is considered one of the leading threats to biodiversity and wildlife habitat (McKinney 2002; Shochat et al. 2006). Urban environments are humandominated systems, yet they support wildlife habitat and provide meaningful ecological functions. Methods to conserve biodiversity and minimize habitat loss and fragmentation in urban environments include utilizing private residential yards and gardens to enhance habitat connectivity. Private residential yards or gardens designed to attract and support wildlife are known as backyard habitats and wildlife gardens. The City of Austin, Texas initiated Wildlife Austin in 2007. Wildlife Austin coordinates backyard habitats in Austin as a National Wildlife Federation Community Wildlife Habitat [trademark]. My research analyzes the goals of the Wildlife Austin from the perspective of landscape ecology and urban ecology; reviews research related to backyard habitats in order to identify ways of enhancing habitat connectivity for bird communities; and provides recommendations for a more scientifically grounded approach and management in the promotion of backyard wildlife habitat.Item Ergonomics and urban green infrastructure : understanding multifunctional social-environmental systems(2014-08) Rinas, Rebecca Jean; Sletto, Bjørn,Although urban green infrastructure [UGI] is increasingly characterized as an asset because it simultaneously serves critical social and environmental functions, few planning tools or research approaches exist where multiple functions are integrated into a systemic spatial analysis. Accordingly, this report examines the utility of ergonomics as a methodological approach to integrate the natural and social sciences and forge a deeper understanding of UGI multifunctionality. Five administrative districts in Dresden [Germany] were selected as a study area to carry out this analysis. Mixed methods were used to categorize and measure various social and environmental functions of UGI cases, and outcomes analyzed for spatial clustering in GIS. Results from this study provide strong evidence that combining social and environmental variables can significantly inform the way UGI networks are perceived and valued.Item Evaluation of anuran persistence in an urbanized drought-affected setting in the Southern High Plains(2012-12) Ramesh, Rasika; Griffis-Kyle, Kerry; Perry, Gad; Farmer, Michael; SanFrancisco, MichaelUrbanization, due to associated habitat degradation and fragmentation, is threatening amphibian survival worldwide. Mitigating urban amphibian declines is critical for amphibian conservation and requires understanding of amphibian life-histories and their use of urban landscapes. Since amphibian monitoring is non-existent in urban centers of the Southern High Plains, I conducted amphibian surveys in 2011 and 2012 in the city of Lubbock, west Texas, to establish fundamental baseline data regarding amphibian species occurring within the city, and evaluated site-suitability at site-specific and landscape scales at 23 urban lakes. While droughts are a recurring phenomenon here, the year 2011 broke past records for drought intensity and severity. I observed greater species richness and incidence of amphibian occurrence in 2012 which was relatively wetter; Bufonids (Anaxyrus speciosus and A. cognatus) were the most widespread. Using data from the drought, I attempted to establish a simple method to base management recommendations in the event of data scarcities associated with natural climatic extremes. This was used to create a preliminary grouping of lakes in order of amphibian management priority and level of management effort, thus emphasizing the importance of data gathered under drought conditions towards amphibian management efforts in the region.Item Marginal nature: urban wastelands and the geography of nature(2009-12) Anderson, Kevin Michael; Doughty, Robin W.; Parmenter, Barbara; Manners, Ian; Young, Kenneth; Richardson, Richard H.In the United States, the foundational myths of Nature are wilderness and pastoral arcadia. This dissertation examines a different kind of nature that emerges as habitats in urban wastelands and margins. This cosmopolitan community is a hybrid nature that is the unintended product of human activity and nature's unflagging opportunism, which I call marginal nature. Marginal nature is neither pristine nor pastoral, but rather a nature whose ecological and cultural significance requires a reassessment of our narratives of nature. The wastelands are unique sounding boards for measuring perceptions of nature, since these places provoke ambiguous responses of attraction and repulsion. I explore perceptions of wasteland habitat from the perspectives of urban space, urban ecology, and literature about urban nature. The primary methodology of this dissertation is hermeneutical inquiry which reveals the layers of environmental discourse concealing marginal nature beneath language that asks it to be something that it is not. This environmental hermeneutics focuses on key issues of the geography of nature: nonhuman agency, place, and nature/society hybrids. I argue that comprehending the lifeworld of the wastelands requires a reassessment of the concept of place as a coproduction of humans and nonhumans, that is, an ecology of place.Item (Re)interpreting vulnerabilities in the peri-urban Valley of Mexico : toward a deeper and more actionable understanding of poverty in Mexico City’s urban fringe(2014-08) Siegel, Samuel Donal; Dooling, SarahSettlement patterns on the urban fringe can present a host of threats to sociopolitical and biophysical sustainability, at the personal, municipal, and ecosystem scale. Mexico City’s expansive growth has forced the region’s poorest inhabitants to the farthest margins in the neighboring State of Mexico, where they often live in conditions of personal hardship and settle in patterns that threaten the ecological health of environmentally sensitive areas. Following interviews with practitioners in three periurban municipalities in the Valley of Mexico, this report examines how local land use regulators interpret the vulnerabilities facing communities in their jurisdictions and presents a typology of vulnerabilities. The report explores the processes of politicization that produce and re-produce the vulnerabilities facing individuals, communities and ecosystems. Several concrete policy recommendations are made for incorporating holistic thinking about vulnerability into government decision-making, and resources are provided for further research.