A model of a human-dominated urban ecosystem as an active medium

The concept of active media is used as a biophysical foundation for modeling spatiotemporal self_ organization in natural–anthropogenic ecosystems, appearing as establishment of regular dynamic structures with stable or unstable modes of development. Urban ecosystems are a hierarchy of interacting active media, with their nonlinearity being objectively formed owing to an extreme anthropogenic load, mismatch between the characteristic times and the evolutionary scales of the natural and anthropogenic components, as well as a complex system of positive and negative feedbacks between the constituent subsystems. The described model is purposefully simplified in order to use the Fitz–Hugh–Nagumo equation. The elaborated approach is of a general character and allows for a systematic description of spatiotemporal development of urban eco-systems as distributed dissipative systems. © Pleiades Publishing, Inc., 2015.