ecological history must merge with cultural history if it is to encompass the full life of the city. This type of urban history sees the city itself as a culture-creating system of biotic relationships and as a place not only where the goods of civilization are made and exchanged but also where experience is heightened and transformed into art, ritual, and civic pageantry. “A product of nature,” the city is also a product of “human nature,” the pioneering Chicago sociologist Robert Park reminds us. But the city, in turn, reshapes human nature.
