Self-Organization and the City

Cities first came into existence more than five thousand years ago. How to deal with these partly fascinating, partly frightening creatures of mankind, both practically and intellectually, concerns all of us and, in particular, presents areal challenge to city planners. Each historical epoch has had its own par ticular attitudes associated with the "Zeitgeist". Accordingly, the planning and steering of cities were based on quite different criteria. But in spite of these differences, the concept of planning and steering was, and still is, the cornerstone of our dealing with cities. Nevertheless, the planner's dilemma is becoming more and more visible: cities and megacities seem to be un plannable. In this book, Juval Portugali intro duces a new idea: Cities are self organizing systems. To substantiate his revolutionary concept, he uses several interlinked methods. On the one hand, and to my own delight, he employs in his arguments theoretical tools developed in the interdisciplinary field of synergetics. On the other hand, jointly with his co-workers, he has performed detailed model calculations on cellular nets. It has been a great pleasure and a wonderful experience for me to discuss these concepts with Juval Portugali over a number of years. I was repeatedly and deeply impressed by the way he established profound and often surprising links to other fields of science.

This book uses techniques from dynamical complexity and synergetics to successfully tackle open questions in the social sciences.

Texte du rabat

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.

Résumé
From the reviews
"The author and his associates (...) are to be congratulated on such a sustained and convincing tour de force. This book succintly and succesfully discusses urban process and urban revolution, the utility of heuristic models in studying social, economic, and cultural segregation in cities, and the development of synergetic theories of cities and city planning. (...) it deserves the very widest readership in urban planning and beyond." (Environment and Planning B, 2001)

Contenu
I On Cities and Urbanism.- 1. Cities as Concepts.- 2. Prototype Urbanisms.- 3. Self-Organizing Cities.- II City Games.- 4. Free Agents in a Cellular Space.- 5. City: The Greens and the Blues.- 6. International Migration and the Internal Structure of Cities.- 7. Spatial Cognitive Dissonance and Sociospatial Emergence in a Self-Organizing City.- 8. Individuals' Cultural Code and Residential Self-Organization in the City.- 9. From CA- to GIS-City.- 10. Internal Complexity and Socio-spatial Segregation of Groups in a Self-Organizing City.- III Self-Organizing Planning.- 11. Planning the Unplannable: Self-Organization and City Planning.- 12. Artificial Planning Experience.- IV Synergetic Cities.- 13. Synergetic Cities I: The Pattern Recognition Approach.- 14. Synergetic Cities II: Pattern Recognition, Cognitive Mapping and Decision-Making.- V Self-Organization and Urban Revolutions.- 15. Self-Organization and Urban Revolutions.- Concluding Notes: Self-Organizing Cities at the Gate of the 21st Century.