Complexity, Cognition and the City

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.

Foreword.- Preface.- Introduction.- Part I: The Culture of Cities.- The Two Cultures of Cities.- The First Culture of Cities.- The Second Culture of Cities.- Complexity Theories of Cities (CTC).- Complexity Theories of Cities Have Come of Age: Achievements, Criticism, and Potentials. Part II: Complexity, Cognition and the City.- Cognition, Complexity and the City.- SIRN – Synergetic Inter-Representation Networks.- Shannonian Information and the City.- Semantic Information and the City.- Notes on the Category ‘City’.- Complex Artificial Environments.- Part III: Complexity, Cognition and Planning.- The Two Cultures of Planning.- Complexity, Cognition, and Planning.- Learning from Paradoxes about Prediction and Planning in Self-Organizing Cities.- CTC, Social Theory Oriented Urban Theory, and Planning.- A Self-Planned City.- Part IV: Complexity, Cognition and Urban Simulation Models.- Revisiting Cognitive Dissonance and Memes-Derived Urban Simulation Models.- CogCity (Cognitive City): A Top-down -> Bottom-up USM.- Pattern Recognition, SIRN and Decision Making.- Decision Making, Conflicts and Time in a Synergetic City.- Concluding Notes: Complexity Theories of Cities at the Gate of the 2010s.- Bibliography.