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...

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...

Juval Portugali The notion of complex artificial environments (CAE) refers to theories of c- plexity and self-organization, as well as to artifacts in general, and to artificial - vironments, such as cities, in particular. The link between the two, however, is not trivial. For one thing, the theories of complexity and self-organization originated in the hard science and by reference to natural phenomena in physics and bi- ogy. The study of artifacts, per contra, has traditionally been the business of the soft disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. The notion of complex artificial...