The City and Its Sciences [Paperback]

Recent developments in the field of urban analysis and management are investigated in this book. It is a wide-ranging collection of essays on the subject drawn from a long-term project and seminar, held in Italy, to review the state of the art and speculate on the future influence on the sciences of the city of the complexity concept. Of particular interest is the variety of points of view, often contrasting, and the attempt to go beyond the conventional approaches to the analysis, and the planning of the city. While focussing mainly on the European (and in particular Italian) context, the discussion is of general relevance and valuable to anyone concerned with the prospects for the city in the new millenium.Recent developments in the field of urban analysis and management are investigated in this book. It is a wide-ranging collection of essays on the subject drawn from a long-term project and seminar, held in Italy, to review the state of the art and speculate on the future influence on the sciences of the city of the complexity concept. Of particular interest is the variety of points of view, often contrasting, and the attempt to go beyond the conventional approaches to the analysis, and the planning of the city. While focussing mainly on the European (and in particular Italian) context, the discussion is of general relevance and valuable to anyone concerned with the prospects for the city in the new millenium.The City as a Highly Complex Entity: Cities as Self-Organizing Complex Systems; A Short Discussion of Alternative Approaches to Modelling Complex Self-Organizing Systems; The Possibilities and Limits of Self-Organisation; On the Foundations of Social Dynamics: An Efficient Mathematical Statement of a General Framework Underlying a Complex Nonlinear Social Determinism: A Supra-Observer and a Suprastructure; Urban Development as a Guided Self-Organisation Process; Strange Loops, Tangled Hierarchies and Urban Self-Regulation; The Fractal Geometry of Urban Ol3+