urban ecology

Tomorrow I'm going to a meeting on how to teach writing to graduate urban planning students and am really excited about the possibilities of such. The teacher sent me the reading list, which is chock-full of fascinating-sounding books on urban ecology, new urbanism, and visions of how cities of the future will look. Here are a few tempting titles:

Jonathan Barnett, The Fractured Metropolis
Timothy Beatley and Kristy Manning, Ecology of Place
Timothy Beatley, Green Urbanism
Hans Blumenfeld, The Modern Metropolis
Peter Dreier, John Mollenkopf, and Todd Swanstrom, Place Matters, Metropolitics for the 21st Century
John Forester, The Deliberative Practioner
Paul Goodman and Percival, Communitas
Sharon Zukin, Landscapes of Power

I always felt you could observe many natural processes at their rawest in the city (i.e., crowd patterns in the rush to the subway at 5 pm in the financial district, or pigeons fighting over fried chicken--cannibalism upon competition! Or pigeons fighting over fried chicken in the financial district...in front of the New York Stock Exchange...). But given the traditional binary concept of wilderness/city that blinds many to the intense ecological action going on in city-central, it's an interesting challenge to "translate" these relatively unobserved dynamics into words, especially since those words not only carry "description," but social import, given the city is a wilderness of human communication, as well.