Richard T. T. Foreman, Cambridge University Press, 2014. 474 pages, RRP $96.95
Why urban ecology? For those landscape architects practising in the urban domain, the imperative of ecological health is an article of faith. Our ethos of “stewardship” demands that. Our knowledge is and has been, however, underpinned by a hotch-potch of research about environmental function, much of which has been based on research beyond the city limits. Since 1986, that hotchpotch has included Richard T. T. Forman and Michel Godron’s seminal Landscape Ecology, a comprehensive volume that for the first time, explained how a whole landscape could be described in scientific terms, including its components and their environmental function. Most importantly for landscape planners and architects, Landscape Ecology and Forman’s publications since have also shown how the ecology of…
