The Ecology of the City

The Ecology of the City

The city is an ecosystem interacting with multiple other ecosystems. This is the reality that underlies an ecological view of urban mission.

The City as Ecosystem. The city is an ecosystem physically, socially, culturally. But Christians know, as Jacques Ellul discerned, that the city is also a spiritual reality. Better: It is a spiritual ecosystem. It is the locus of principalities and powers of all sorts. Its dynamics are affected by prayer, by worship, by Christian community, and by multiple forms of Christian witness. Its life is shaped as much by spiritual things as by physical things—probably more.

This is fact, not theory. The city is a complex interplay between its physicality and its spirituality. This is what makes the church of Jesus Christ unique. As the body of Christ, the church knows the secret. “We wrestle” in multiple dimensions. And the church’s impact—redemptively or not—flows in all these directions, follows all these paths and byways. The church’s impact is both physical and spiritual, with the two in constant interaction—as we know personally, with our own body-spirit struggles. So urban mission necessarily touches everything, including how we do or do not care for creation.

The city, in other words, is inescapably and necessarily part of the non-urban environment. City and non-city depend upon each other for their very existence. You can’t have Chicago without downstate Illinois and Lake Michigan, or Singapore without oceans. They are all part of one ecology. The literal, watery connection between Lake Michigan and earth’s oceans reminds us that every urban ecosystem is connected with the global ecosystem.

The City and the Land. Today much of the world is rapidly urbanizing. Usually urbanization is treated however as though it were only a matter of cities.

Feature Howard A. Snyder

But urbanization is always only half the story. The other story, of equal ultimate importance, concerns the land—the land that remains and does not move to the city. People move to cities and leave the land behind, but they do not leave their dependence upon the land. Yet, as people move to cities, they lose ancient wisdom about the land.

Urban ecology therefore must include the land and its wisdom. Therefore, urban mission, viewed ecologically, will include the land in its scope.

Our grandparents or great-grandparents understood much about the land. Most knew how to farm, of course. But, equally important, they knew about birds, plants, animals, the flow of rivers, the changing of seasons, the stars, and the cycles of nature. They knew about medicinal plants. They knew how to grow food, and the fresh tang of fruits and vegetables straight from the garden rather than those manufactured in factories.

This is no longer the case for city dwellers the world over. Yet we know—both theologically and increasingly scientifically—that human flourishing requires living in contact with the land, with nature, with the created order. It’s built into us as part of God’s plan.

Without this bond with the land and its creatures we suffer what Richard Louv calls “nature-deficit disorder.” Human development, and especially childhood development, is hampered by lack of unstructured interface with the world of nature. 3

If we speak of urbanization we must speak also of the land, and what has been lost in the move to the cities. In the study and practice of urban mission, we must heed the land as well as the city. We learn that our cities depend for their very existence on land—both the land they occupy and often pollute, and the land that supplies their food and water.

This doesn’t mean Christians should move out of cities and into rural areas. What must happen rather is the recovery of ancient wisdom about the land, and thus the recovery of a harmony between land and people. We must come to understand the real, actual ecology of our relationship with the beautiful but vulnerable created order

3 Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Algonquin Books, 2008).

NEW URBAN WORLD

(urban and non-urban) that God has given us. This has big meanings for urban mission. No person and no church is healthy without healthy interaction with the land. No mission is holistic if it does not include the biblical, covenantal relationship with the land and all God’s creatures (Gen 9). No city can be healthy and sustainable over time if it does not learn to live in sustainable harmony with the land.

Here is a call for creativity. It raises issues of urban farming, cooperatives, community markets, trees and flowers, artwork, and poetry. It presents the challenge of getting city people out to the country from time to time and country people into the cities.