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Diagram: Brian Berry

Brian Berry

Urban Dynamics

Cities as Systems within Systems of Cities


Berry is a highly cited geographer who, very early on, was interested in some of the power-law regularities observed between cities. He also was an early proponent of seeing individual cities as systems, themselves part of larger systems of cities. Berry was an advocate of the General Systems approach to thinking, which positioned many diverse phenomena as obeying similar general laws. 

Berry, though not directly a complexity theorist, discusses many of the key aspects of complexity in one of his seminal papers "Cities as Systems within systems of Cities". In that paper he refers not only to power-laws, but to information theory, general systems theory, entropy, negentropy, cybernetics, feedback. Specifically, his is interested in the 'amplifying' (or positive feedback) processes that counter the second law of thermodynamics, and would suggest that city growth within a system runs along the lines of 'the rich get richer'.

His work precedes that of computer modelers (though he anticipates the importance of computers in being able to model urban behavior), but his thinking nonetheless influenced those who ultimately took up modeling as a method for understanding the dynamics he outlines. 

 


Cite this page:

Wohl, S. (2022, 24 May). Brian Berry. Retrieved from https://kapalicarsi.wittmeyer.io/definition/denise-pumain

Brian Berry was updated May 24th, 2022.

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There would be some thought experiments here.

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