Communities in Transition: Making other sustainable practices in urban ecosystems

Abstract

Through the field of study of Urban and Social Ecology, analyzing the interactions between society and the environment and relating social and urban phenomena with ecological ones, we can consider human systems as urban ecosystems, conceiving the city as a set of interconnected organisms with a certain degree of autonomy, functioning as support for the social systems that articulate the global and local scales. Consenting that we do not need to invent sustainable urban communities from scratch, but if we mold them according to the nature and the theories of ecology, we find in natural systems the keys to the practice of the abstract concept of sustainability (from the social, ecological, economic, geographical and cultural) in our cities, obtaining the necessary parameters for the organization, diagnosis, intervention or evaluation of human communities.