The term "urban ecology" has become a buzzword in various disciplines, including the social and natural sciences as well as urban planning and architecture. The environmental humanities have been slow to adapt to current theoretical debates, often excluding human-built environments from their respective frameworks. This book closes this gap both in theory and in practice, bringing together "urban ecology" with ecocritical and cultural ecological approaches by conceptualizing the city as an integral part of the environment and as a space in which ecological problems manifest concretely....

The volume examines forms and functions of fictional and factual anticipatory environmental (hi)stories from antiquity to the Anthropocene, offering a diachronic as well as cross-cultural perspective on how different authors and societies have imagined their respective future environments.