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This book integrates the theories of complex self-organizing systems with the rich body of discourse and literature developed in what might be called ‘social theory of cities and urbanism’. It uses techniques from dynamical complexity and synergetics to successfully tackle open social science questions.
This book, which resulted from an intensive discourse between experts from several disciplines – complexity theorists, cognitive scientists, philosophers, urban planners and urban designers, as well as a zoologist and a physiologist – addresses various issues regarding cities. It is a first step in responding to the challenge of generating just such a discourse, based on a dilemma identified in the CTC (Complexity Theories of Cities) domain. The latter has demonstrated that cities exhibit the properties of natural, organic complex systems: they are open, complex and bottom-up, have fractal structures and are often chaotic. CTC have further shown that many of the mathematical formalisms a...
Written by some of the founders of complexity theory and complexity theories of cities (CTC), this Handbook expertly guides the reader through over forty years of intertwined developments: the emergence of general theories of complex self-organized systems and the consequent emergence of CTC.
Complexity, Cognition and the City aims at a deeper understanding of urbanism, while invoking, on an equal footing, the contributions both the hard and soft sciences have made, and are still making, when grappling with the many issues and facets of regional planning and dynamics. In this work, the author goes beyond merely seeing the city as a self-organized, emerging pattern of some collective interaction between many stylized urban "agents" – he makes the crucial step of attributing cognition to his agents and thus raises, for the first time, the question on how to deal with a complex system composed of many interacting complex agents in clearly defined settings. Accordingly, the author ...
Today, our cities are an embodiment of the complex, historical evolution of knowledge, desires and technology. Our planned and designed activities co-evolve with our aspirations, mediated by the existing technologies and social structures. The city represents the accretion and accumulation of successive layers of collective activity, structuring and being structured by other, increasingly distant cities, reaching now right around the globe. This historical and structural development cannot therefore be understood or captured by any set of fixed quantitative relations. Structural changes imply that the patterns of growth, and their underlying reasons change over time, and therefore that any attempt to control the morphology of cities and their patterns of flow by means of planning and design, must be dynamical, based on the mechanisms that drive the changes occurring at a given moment. This carefully edited post-proceedings volume gathers a snapshot view by leading researchers in field, of current complexity theories of cities. In it, the achievements, criticisms and potentials yet to be realized are reviewed and the implications to planning and urban design are assessed.
and processes which are exclusive to humans in their encoding, storing, decoding and retrieving spatial knowledge for various tasks. The authors present and discuss connectionist models of cognitive maps which are based on local representation, versus models which are based on distributed representation, as well as connectionist models concerning language and spatial relations. As is well known, Gibson's (1979) ecological approach suggests a view on cognition which is diametrically different from the classical main stream view: perception (and thus cognition) is direct, immediate and needs no internal information processing, and is thus essentially an external process of interaction between ...
In his beautiful booklnvisible eities Italo Calvino writes about the two cities ofValdrada, the one which lies on the shores of a lake, and the other which is reflected in the lake and contains not only the exterior of Valdrada on the shores, but also its interior, and probably its inhabitants. "Valdrada's inhabitants know", writes Calvino, "that each of their actions is, at once, that action and its mirror image . . . and this awareness prevents them from succumbing for a single moment to chance and forgetfulness". Such mirror image relations are characteristic of the Israeli-Palestinian relations, and the awareness of this property is, to my mind, one of the most dominant experiences in be...
This ground-breaking Handbook presents a state-of-the-art exploration of entropy, complexity and spatial dynamics from fundamental theoretical, empirical and methodological perspectives. It considers how foundational theories can contribute to new advances, including novel modeling and empirical insights at different sectoral, spatial and temporal scales.
The shared platform of the articles collected in this volume is usedto advocate a dynamical systems approach to cognition. It is arguedthat recent developments in cognitive science towards an account ofembodiment, together with the general approach of complexity theoryand dynamics, have a major impact on behavioral and cognitivescience.
During the past twenty years, a broad spectrum of theories and methods have been developed in physics, chemistry and molecular biology to explain structure formation in complex systems. These methods have been applied to many different fields such as economics, sociology and town planning, and this book reflects the interdisciplinary nature of complexity and self-organisation. The main focus is on the emergence of collective phenomena from individual or microscopic interactions. Presents a wide-ranging overview from fundamental aspects of the evolution of complexity, to applications in biology, ecology, sociology, economics, and urban structure formation.