How Is Urbanization Making America Socially and Ecologically Homogeneous?
Land uses and management practices in residential parcels (e.g., aesthetic/recreational/economic uses, land-cover choices, irrigation and chemical applications) impact and are impacted by social (e.g., stratification and status, environmental perceptions, zoning) and ecological (e.g., carbon sequestration, nutrient cycling, water demand and quality) processes. As the dominant yard-cover type for single-family homes, grass is ubiquitous in human-dominated ecosystems spanning urban and suburban areas, where significant amounts of water and chemical inputs are necessary to maintain the traditional notion of a hyper-green, weed-free lawn. Especially since post-WWII (sub)urbanization, the proliferation of standard residential developments has raised important questions about the homogenization of US society and landscapes. Some scholars have suggested that, regardless of their ecological or biophysical settings, urban and suburban places may be more similar to each other than they are to ‘natural’ areas within their metropolitan environs (the homogenization hypothesis). One way to test the extent and nature of the homogenization thesis is to examine the process of residential lawn-care over time and in diverse cities simultaneously. In this working session at the LTER ASM, we will develop a cross-site proposal (for the November 2009 Coupled Natural-Human Systems program at NSF) to examine the degree to which the social-ecological dynamics of residential landscapes play out within and across major U.S. cities (specifically, Phoenix, AZ, Baltimore, MD, Boston, MA, and Miami, FL). At scales ranging from households and neighborhoods to municipalities and broader scales, related research is ongoing at multiple LTER sites (CAP, BES, PIE, and FCE, among others), with each employing complementary theoretical and methodological approaches to understand the social and ecological drivers and impacts of lawns and residential landscapes. In addition to nascent collaborative discussions and conference sessions, our research group held two workshops in the last year to develop complementary research ideas and protocols that build upon the single-region LTER studies underway. So far, resulting products include a workshop report (see attached document) and a paper (currently in progress) synthesizing our research approaches and, more broadly, furthering integrated social-ecological theory and methods. Polsky, Grove, Larson, Ogden and Roy Chowdhury also received a four-site collaborative social science supplement grant to standardize data collection across sites for comparative analyses of the ecological structure of yards and associated drivers of management practices. Overall, we are well poised to undertake a collaborative cross-site proposal to formalize our regional comparisons for the advancement of interdisciplinary theory on complex human-environment dynamics. The 6-hour product-oriented working group, which involves several LTER but will be closed to the public, will be incredibly productive for this cross-site research initiative.