Paolo Giordano

Sergio Albeverio

Denise Andrey

Alberto Vancheri

This book contains the contributions presented at the international workshop "The Dynamics of Complex Urban Systems: an interdisciplinary approach" held in Ascona, Switzerland in November 2004. Experts from several disciplines outline a conceptual framework for modeling and forecasting the dynamics of both growth-limited cities and megacities. Coverage reflects the various interdependencies between structural and social development.

An Interdisciplinary Approach

The Dynamics of Complex Urban Systems

Safiya 

Was there mainly for Batty, whom I consider to be the father of urban models. It's a rich recueil of contributions across disciplines (related to urban planning that is) - theory, planning, models and specifics : transport - mobility - aggregations - etc...
It's epic how when all of this seemed novel then, scarce were direct applications of these models. Although the first idea we had of these models captured an erroneous conception of urban planning - considering it to be stochastic and reach an equilibrium which is not the case, their contribution to city science is meaningful and better than none!
But one has to keep in mind one thing related to complexity : it's not because there are many agents interacting in the urban sphere, or because of the huge amount of data required to understand these mechanisms (those would be complicated not complex) - but it's because the interaction is non-linear and doesn't depend on initial conditions somewhere between randomness, chaos and order. 
So many times you might apply the same policy guidelines in the same city and yet end up with different output ... 
What's interesting and noteworthy is the naiveté with which planning is being taught: History is a good case study but isn't enough for urban planners. Cities require not multidisciplinary but transdisciplinarity / interdisciplinarity ...
Throw back to when I justified urban planning decisions based on mediocre descriptions on the urban morphology poorly restated straight out of Panerai ... Or worse : La Charte d'Athènes (SHAME) ...

The Dynamics of Complex Urban Systems An Interdisciplinary Approach

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