Complexity, Cognition, Urban Planning and Design: Post-Proceedings of the 2nd Delft International Conference

ISBN-13: 9783319326511 / Angielski / Twarda / 2016 / 316 str.

Juval Portugali; Egbert Stolk

Opis

The last four decades have witnessed the emergence of CTC Complexity Theories of Cities a domain of research that applies the various complexity theories to the study of cities.
Studies in this domain have demonstrated, firstly, that similarly to materialand organic complex systems cities too exhibit the properties of natural complex systems: they are open, complex, bottom-up, have fractal structure and are often chaotic. Secondly, that many of the mathematical formalisms and models developed to study material and organic complex systems apply also to cities.
But there is a dilemma in the current state of CTC: Cities are large scale artifacts, composed of smaller scale artifacts (buildings, roads, bridges ), each of which is composed of still smaller artifacts and so on. And yet, artifacts are essentially simple systems.
This book argues that the activities and interactions of the human urban agents transform the artifact city into a complex system city . Cities differ from natural complex systems in that they are hybrid, artificial-natural complex systems. From here follows a need to add the insight of cognitive science to the study of urban agents and their behavior and action in cities, raising a new set of questions, such as what are artifacts and in what ways they differ from natural entities? How are they constructed? How the city as a hybrid natural-artificial entity is coordinated? What is the role of planning and design in the dynamics and coordination of cities? Who are the planners and designers and how do they plan and design and by what means? What is the role of cognitive faculties such as memory, emotions and creativity in the process of design? What role do latent and professional designers and planners play?
The answers to these questions cannot come from a single discipline; rather they must emerge out of a discourse between experts from several disciplines. The fact is, however, that due to current disciplinary boundaries, people from these domains do not often interact with each other. This is exactly the challenge this book took upon itself: to generate such a discourse."

Spis treści

Introduction.- Part I: Complexity, Cognition and Cities.- 1. What makes cities complex?.- 2. Evolving a Plan: Design and Planning with Complexity.- 3. Self-organization and design as complementary pair.- 4. Cultivating complexity: The need for a shift in cognition.- 5. The fourth sustainability, creativity: Statistical associations and credible mechanism.- 6. Design thinking as principles for the structure of creative cities.- Part II: On Termites, Rats and Cities.- 7. Swarm cognition and swarm construction. Lessons from a social insect master builder.- 8. Physical, Behavioral, and Spatiotemporal Perspectives of Home in Humans and other Animals.- Part III: Complexity, Cognition and Planning.- 9. Framing the Planning Game: A cognitive understanding of the planner’s rationale in a differentiated world.- 10. Global scale predictions of cities in urban and in cognitive planning.- 11. Emotional cognition and urban planning.- Part IV: Complexity, Cognition and Design.- 12. A Complexity-Cognitive view on Scale in Urban Design.- 13. Lines: Orderly and Messy.

Blurb

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 and models developed to study material and organic complex systems also apply to cities. The dilemma in the current state of CTC is that cities differ from natural complex systems in that they are hybrid complex systems composed, on the one hand, of artifacts such as buildings, roads and bridges, and of natural human agents on the other. This raises a plethora of new questions on the difference between the natural and the artificial, the cognitive origin of human action and behavior, and the role of planning and designing cities. The answers to these questions cannot come from a single discipline; they must instead emerge from a discourse between experts from several disciplines engaged in CTC.