Researching Cities, Transforming Ecology

Abstract

In the last two decades, new academic journals, textbooks, and research networks attest to ecologists’ rising interest in cities. How did ecologists come to enter cities and to view them as places worth studying? To what extent does this new interest launch a broader redefinition of the type of knowledge that matters in ecology? Drawing on the new political sociology of science, and using a review of publications in urban ecology, we argue that the politics of urban ecological knowledge does not merely correspond to the promotion of a new subfield of ecology dedicated to cities: it has launched instead a broader, contested redefinition of the goals, practices, and relevance of ecology as a whole. We unpack the tensions between a “city-driven agenda” aiming to integrate ecological science into the interdisciplinary field of urban sciences, and an “ecology-driven agenda” aiming to research cities as part of ecological discipline.