Complexity, Cognition and the City (Understanding Complex Systems)
Juval Portugali
Language: English
Pages: 412
ISBN: 3642194508
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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 eventually addresses issues of practical relevance for urban planners and decision makers.
The book unfolds its message in a largely nontechnical manner, so as to provide a broad interdisciplinary readership with insights, ideas, and other stimuli to encourage further research – with the twofold aim of further pushing back the boundaries of complexity science and emphasizing the all-important interrelation of hard and soft sciences in recognizing the cognitive sciences as another necessary ingredient for meaningful urban studies.
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Here too we shall find the highly perishable products, which must be used very quickly. With increasing distance from the Town, the land will progressively be given up to products cheap to transport in relation to their value. For this reason alone, fairly sharply differentiated concentric rings or belts will form around the Town, each with its own particular staple product. From ring to ring the staple product, and with it the entire farming system, will change; and in the various rings we shall
Fig. 3.1. In The Urbanization of Capital Harvey (1985a) portrayed another image of a Marxist city. It is constructed by showing how the very laws of capitalism as formulated by Marx(ism) entail, as a logical consequence, the specific capitalist urban landscape as we know it today. Capitalism as the dominant mode of production of our age is characterized by structurally inherent inner tensions and contradictions and is thus chronically unstable. As a consequence, the landscape of capitalism is
Milgram was not the first to study this issue. In fact he started his experiments in the US after coming from Paris where he was working with other scholars on this very issue. Also, the notion of six degrees of separation, which is often attributed to Milgram was in fact coined by the American playwrite John Gare. For several decades Milgram‘s experimental results had the fate of most scientific studies, namely, they attracted a small community of scientists interested in this topic. However, at
are ‘information carriers’ and they differ from one another and thus in the role they take in shaping people’s image of the city by their information content. 8.4 8.4.1 Shannon’s Information and Cognition Shannon’s Information The notion information is a frequently used word in everyday language and in scientific language. On the other hand, however, the notion also refers to a formal concept and a theory – Shannon’s information theory (Shannon and Weaver 1949). 8.4 Shannon’s Information and
this statement seems trivial, it has farreaching implications, as we shall see in the next chapter, namely in this case, the fixation of this index means: we are using semantic information, or in other words, that we are implying the process of pattern recognition. The choice of the indices j, which means a categorization, partly depends on objectively given data, partly on the way we are selecting and interpreting them. Once this index j, which may run for instance from 1 – M, is chosen, we may
