We are all familiar with the concept of adaptation as it relates to evolution, with Darwin outlining how species diversity is made possible by mutations that enhance a species' capacity to survive and thereby reproduce. Over time, mutations that are well-adapted to a given context will survive, and ill-adapted ones will perish. Through this simple process - repeated in parallel over multiple generations - species are generated that are supremely tuned to their environmental context. While originating in biological realms, a more 'general' Darwinism looks to processes outside this context to examine how similar mechanisms may be at play in a broad range of systems. Accordingly, ANY system - biological or not - that has the capacity for Variation, Selection, and Retention (VSR), is able to adapt and become more 'fit'.
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Assemblage geographers consider space in ways similar to relational geographers. However, they focus more on the temporary and contingent ways in which forces and flows come together to form stable entities. Thus, they are less attuned to the mechanics of how specific relations coalesce, and more to the contingent and agentic aspects of the assemblages that manifest.
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CAS are composed of populations of discreet elements - be they water molecules, ants, neurons, etc. - that nonetheless behave as a group. At the group level, novel forms of global order arise strictly due to simple interactions occurring at the level of the elements. Accordingly, CAS are described as "Bottom-up": global order is generated from below rather than coordinated from above. That said, once global features have manifested they stabilize - spurring a recursive loop that alters the environment within which the elements operate and constraining subsequent system performance.
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A growing number of spatial planners are realizing that they need to harness many voices in order to navigate the complexities of the planning process. Communicative strategies aim to move from a top-down approach of planning, to one that engages many voices from the bottom up. Learn More about Communicative Planning →
'Complexity of cities' has become a recognized field of research, but there is no unified way of thinking about how to manage, model, or design for urban complexity. The pages of this site devoted to complexity and urbanism aim to clarify the breadth of urban inquiry engaging complexity, and how each particular discourse embraces key principles and concepts from complexity sciences in different ways.
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Explore an array of key concepts related to complexity! Each concept is defined using non-mathematical descriptions with reference to key thinkers, publications, and associated terms.
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Complex systems, while operating as bounded 'wholes', are not entirely bounded. They remain open to the environment, which, in some fashion, 'feeds' or 'drives' the system: providing energy that can be used by the system to build and retain structure. Thus complex systems violate the second law of thermodynamics in that, rather than tending towards disorder (entropy), they are pushed towards order (negentropy). This would not be possible in the absence of some external source of input. This input can be thought of as the "fuel" for the agents within the systems, that could be in the form of food for ants, clicks for a website, or trades for a stock market.
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Emergence refers to the unexpected manifestion of unique phenomena appearing in a complex system in the absence of top-down control. Emergent, integrated wholes are able to manifest through self-organizing, bottom-up processes, with these wholes exhibiting clear, functional, structures. These phenomena are intriguing in part due to their unexpectedness. Coordinated behaviors yield an emergent pattern or synchronized outcome that holds properties distinct from that of the individual agents in the system. Emergence can refer both to these novel global phenomena themselves (such as ant trails, Benard rolls or traffic jams) or to the mathematical regularities - such as power-laws - associated with them. Learn More about Emergence →
Evolutionary Economic Geography (EEG) tries to understand how economic agglomerations or clusters emerge from the bottom-up. This branch of economics draws significantly from principles of complexity and emergence, seeing the rise of particular regions as path-dependent, and looking to understand the forces that drive change for firms - seen as the agents evolving within an economic environment. Learn More about Evolutionary Geography →
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This branch of Urban Thinking consider how the nature of the morphologic characteristics of the built environment factors into its ability to evolve over time. Here, we study the ways in which the built fabric can be designed to support incremental evolution
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A large body of contemporary landscape design thinking tries to understand how designs can be less about making things, and more about stewarding processes that create a 'fit' between the intervention and the context. Landscape Urbanists advancing these techniques draw concepts and vocabulary from complex adaptive systems theory.
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Complex systems exhibit important scalar dynamics from two perspectives. First, they are often built up from nested sub-systems, which themselves may be complex systems. Second, at a given scale of inquiry within the system, there will be a tendency for the system to exhibit Power Laws (or scale-free) dynamics in terms of how the system operates. This simply means that there will be a tendency in the system for a small number of elements within the system to dominate: this system domination can manifest in different ways, such as intensity (earthquakes) frequency (citations) or physical size (road networks). In all cases a small ratio of system components (earthquakes, citations, or roads) carry a large ratio of system impact. Understanding how and why this operates is important to the study of complexity. Learn More about Nested Orders →
Non-linear systems are ones in which a small change to initial conditions can result in a large scale change to the system's behavior over the course of time. This is due to the fact that such systems are subject to cascading feedback loops, that amplify slight changes. The notion has been popularized in the concept of 'the butterfly effect'. This effect - the idea that the beating of a butterfly's wings in Brazil, might set off a Tornado in Texas - is counterintuitive because of the scale difference. We tend to think that big effects are the result of big causes. Non-linear systems do not work that way, and instead a very small shift in initial conditions can result in massive system change. Learn More about Non-Linearity →
Parametric approaches to urban design are based on creating responsive models of urban contexts that are programmed to change form according to how inputs are varied. Rather than the architect creating a final product, they instead create a space of possibilities ({{phase-space}}) that is activated according to how various flow variables - economic, environmental, or social, are tweaked. This architectural form-making approachholds similarities to complex systems in terms of how entities are framed: less as objects in and of themselves, and more as responsive, adaptive agents, activated by differential inputs.
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Relational Geographers examine how particular places are constituted by forces and flows that operate at a distance. They recognize that flows of energy, people, resources and materials are what activate place, and focus their attention upon understanding the nature of these flows.
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Increasingly, we are becoming concerned with how we can make cities capable of responding to change and stress. Resilient urbanism takes guidance from some complexity principles with regards to how the urban fabric can adapt to change. Learn More about Resilient Urbanism →
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Tactical Urbanism is a branch of urban thinking that tries to understand the role of grassroots, bottom-up initiatives in creating meaningful urban space. While not associating itself directly with complexity theory, many of the tools it employs -particularly its way of 'learning by doing' - ties in with adaptive and emergent concepts from complexity.
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The words used to describe the behaviors of Complex systems are often technical or ambiguous. Further, depending upon the research field, different terms may be used to refer to the same phenomena. This site endeavors to disambiguate terminology associated with CAS, as well as highlight parallel terms used to refer to the same concept across discourses.
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More and more, the proliferation of data is leading to new opportunities in how we inhabit space. How might a data-steered environment operate as a complex system?
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Cities around the world are growing without the capacity for top-down control. Informal urbanism is an example of bottom-up processes that shape the city. Can these processes be harnessed in ways that make them more effective and productive?
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There is a large body of research that employs computational techniques - in particular agent based modeling (ABM) and cellular automata (CA) to understand complex urban dynamics. This strategy looks at how rule based systems yield emergent structures.
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