txtspot.blogg.se - Complex cognitive processes

Leading on to the ‘fundamental questions’: What are the useful connections between complexity, urban planning and design and what these fields can in turn contribute to complexity theories?

Foundations of Complexity: Unravelling key complexity concepts, their meaning, opportunities and barriers to use.

However, we have yet to bring the conversation back to the city and how core concepts of complexity might in turn be informed by research from the urban fields. We utilise methodological approaches from complexity to understand urban phenomena and the organisational complexity of intervention within these complex (cognitive) systems. We know that urban systems and sub-systems are dynamic, temporal, emergent and cognitive, requiring interdisciplinary research frameworks. Ten years later, we continue to acknowledge cities and processes of operating with and in them as examples of complexity.

The theories from different disciplinary areas have been conceptually and sometimes metaphorically incorporated into urban planning and design to understand and intervene within transformative urban processes. Planning and design continue to draw from multiple areas in the complexity field by building on historic concepts such as economic complexity and associated ideas of equilibrium and the invisible hand, complexity in physics and mathematics with reference to the systems on the edge of chaos and non-linear systems, ideas of bottom-up organisation from the social-sciences and evolutionary perspectives from ecology through complex adaptive systems. The complexity sciences have since continued to enrich urban planning and research conceptually and methodologically. In 2012, the collection of papers in the publication titled “Complexity Theories of Cities Have Come of Age'' suggested that urban planning and design researchers had arrived at a moment in time that marked the convergence of a research field into a united understanding of the underlying theoretical frameworks.

Can engagement with complexity provide frameworks and approaches that have eluded us so far?

In parallel, faced with catastrophic climate change and related undesirable sustainability outcomes, the ‘urban’ is seen as the site of influence, exacerbated impact and potential solution. Today, societal transformations linked to technological change such as datafication, AI, automation and virtualisation, encapsulate new dimensions of potential risk and solution-oriented action, while suggesting the need for an updated CTC framework. Complexity Theories of Cities (CTC) have incorporated a multitude of conceptual perspectives over time, including uncertainty, wicked problems, system dynamics, self-organisation, non-linearity, graph-based systems, emergence, path-dependency, transitions, coevolution, interdependencies, open systems, cognitive behaviour, adaptivity, soft and hard systems. The research field is an emergent combination of multiple and transdisciplinary perspectives attempting to analyse, understand, influence and design future trajectories of urban transformation using a complexity framework incorporating the temporal dimension. Planning and complexity engages with the plurality of the urban as a complex relational web of systems, processes and flows. We still have a few spaces left for the 21 st AESOP Planning and Complexity thematic group conference, hence we are accepting a final round of abstracts until 23 rd of January 2023 20-22 April 2023, Manchester (UK) - The 21st meetingĬomplex Cities: Sensing, planning and design in urban transformations