Park and Burgess in 1920, from plant and animal ecology and from Simmel, introduced the term and the Chicago School was created, which developed urban ecology and which is still valid in the introductory part of academic programs. The Department of Sociology II (Human Ecology and Population) of the Faculty of Sociology of the UCM contains programs and bibliography. The dilemma of survival. The Spanish before the Environment, by Juan Díez Nicolás. Obra Social Caja Madrid, 2004., for example. EH is more popular in America as urban ecology and regional ecology, than in Europe. Approaches such as megalopolises have given a global vision to settlement networks, explaining many events with applications in the transportation of people and goods with new paradigms of distribution of spatial work between numerous satellite cities and the most influential cities due to their real benefits or those of historical origin and in transition.
In the community, competition (change and counterbalanced balance) is key, which maintains and restores balance and which would lead to cooperation. The exchange in both directions and the review of the concept of autopoiesis and isomorphism is useful for ecological explanation. A typical borderline case is the imaginary and idealized community development in utopias with emphasis on social organization or in scientific fiction writers with technological primacy. Projects that have been suggested as quasi-experimental fieldwork in the fieldwork versions.
By 1950 Hawley, who developed the metropolitan area, concomitant with the megalopolis and the city, gave greater importance to theoretical and abstract elaboration and the community continued to be the theme, as a collective response to the environment, the individual and the culture, which was social in functional interdependence and promoting social change, such as urban expansion or vice versa and explained balance as adaptation. The interspecific relationship in living beings illustrates the adaptation processes. This in human ecology is observed in the metropolitan areas or regions as a new advent of the modern city. It is interesting that the Population-Environment-Social Organization-Technology scheme, as a model, has survived in the history of human ecology. Around 1960 Hawley in "The structure of social systems", chapter Idem, establishes as hypotheses some Axioms, Assumptions and Derivations:.
• - Interdependence is necessary.
• - Each of the population units must have access to the environment.
• - Each unit tends to conserve and expand its life to the maximum.
• - The limitations on the adaptive capacity of a population unit are indeterminate.
• - Every unit is subject to the temporal aspect.
Developing each of these axioms in 34 derivations below.
Phrases such as "the human species in the biosphere", "the humanized ecosystem" and manifestations of social movements that use these terms may or may not be empty of content, but they are the new paradigm. So the unstable and expanding and finally deteriorating balance is broken by the new theories of Inglehart") in the 1970s and following with the Postmaterialism Scale, where people after a time of scarcity, which is materialistic, turn to spiritual values. The quality of life in a new perspective, towards the current phase of high information; this quality is that of the environment. The ecological approach is probably the most profitable to incorporate scientific knowledge, even more so than the dialectical and functionalists, although EH seems to be functionalist and structuralist. One way of working with information (documentation) as knowledge managers is by finding a niche, a lair, in the structure of the social ecosystem model.
There are, therefore, two major fields in the discipline:
• - Human ecology studying the relationships of the population and social organization with the ecosystem.
• - Human ecology studying the relationships of the environment and technology with the ecosystem.
Regarding the first field, there are the studies from the Chicago School of Sociology mentioned previously. Regarding the second field, from systemic thinking, there is an emerging branch called Deep Human Ecology,[4] a new philosophical view that highlights the mutual dependencies between living beings and other species on Earth and that redefines what we understand by “natural” or “artificial” to move from a paradigm centered on human beings to one focused on the care of all forms of life, without ceasing to consider the former as parts of that web of life exposed by Fritjof Capra, present in the biosphere, planet Earth.
From these emerging initiatives, the habitats of humans and other animals are understood as a network that unites the "natural" ecosystems of the environment and the "artificial" technosystems of the built environment, showing the natural character of both.[5] As stated by Marín and colleagues:
As a specialization of human ecology is urban ecology, which focuses more on urban systems and does not include the study of human habitat or indigenous, native and rural human populations.
There have been tests of utopian communities, such as microecosystems, that were actually created in real locations and others that were described as theories for a utopia; real agricultural, artisan and livestock farms since the century: missions in New Spain, farms or kibbutz in Israel, in China, plantations in New England, kolkhoz in the Soviet Union, etc.