Robert Park: “Human Ecology” (1936)

Human ecology refers to a branch of sociology that studies the relationship between a human community and its environment. Park considered ecology to be a suitable approach since in the city human beings are distributed and confined within a territory. Thus the city, according to Park, is constitutive of ‘ecological communities’ which was characterized by an unconscious process through which human beings were engaged in a ‘biotic’ struggle for existence. This resulted in a functional adaptation between themselves and their environment. These processes could be studied through the concept of human ecology.