VII. Our Earthuman Ascent: A Major Evolutionary Transition in Twndividuality

3. Planetary Physiosphere: Anatomics, Economics, Urbanomics

Portugali, Juval. Self-Organization and the City. New York: Springer, 1999. A study of how the synergetics approach to complex systems can facilitate a theoretical explanation of urban social dynamics.

Portugali, Juval, ed. Handbook on Cities and Complexity. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2022. The Tel Aviv University systems geographer (search) edits an integral volume to date about how these revolutionary nonlinear network advances can result in deeper perceptions of small and large human habitations. It’s Elgar Online website has Portugali’s opening chapters in full along with chapter abstracts such as City Systems and Complexity by Michael Batty, Synergistic Cities by JP and Hermann Haken, Coevolution as the Secret of Urban Complexity (Denise Pumain, search) and Major Transitions in the Story of Urban Complexity by Stephen Marshall and Nick Green. The collection goes on to an essay by Christopher Alexander, how language gets involved and Design Planning.

Written by some of the founders of complexity theory and complexity theories of cities (CTC), this Handbook expertly guides the reader through over forty years of intertwined developments: the emergence of general theories of complex self-organized systems and the consequent emergence of CTC. (Publisher)

Portugali, Juval, et al, eds. Complexity Theories of Cities Have Come of Age: An Overview with Implications to Urban Planning and Design. Berlin: Springer, 2012. An international collection, with loci in Tel Aviv, Delft, London, and Istanbul, affirms that a two decade engagement to rightly understand all manner of human settlements as actually distinguished, shaped, and sustained by nonlinear dynamics has fulfilled itself. A lead chapter by pioneer theorists Michael Batty and Stephen Marshall, “The Origins of Complexity Theory in Cities and Planning,” provides an historical and current overview. Chapters by Portugali, Peter Allen, Denise Pumain, Stephen Read, Nikos Salingaros, and others shuttle deftly from theory to practice. The promise is an advised empowerment to recreate cities as increasingly viable metabolic entities. See especially above Bill Hillier’s “The Genetic Code for Cities” for further import of these revolutionary conceptions.

Introduction. The notion of complexity theories in the title of this book refers to several theories that originated in the 1960s when physicists such as Hermann Haken and Ilya Prigogine became aware of, and started to study, physical-material systems that exhibit phenomena of emergence, self-organization, history and the like; phenomena that were previously regarded as typifying organic or even socio-cultural systems, but not material systems. These resemblances between phenomena in the animate and inanimate domains were one of the reasons that soon after their emergence complexity theories became a general paradigm that was applied to a variety of domains outside physics, ranging from life sciences to social sciences and the study of cities. (Portugali)

Pulselli, Frederico and Enzo Tiezzi. City Out of Chaos: Urban Self Organization and Sustainability. Billerica, MA: WIT Press, 2009. University of Siena environmental chemists explain how hustle and bustle from neighborhoods to a metropolis is yet amenable to common mathematical analysis via nonlinear dynamical theories. We excerpt from the publisher’s website.

This book introduces concepts from thermodynamics, non-equilibrium systems theory and evolutionary physics in order to approach contemporary cities and to understand how human systems interact with the built environment. This theoretical framework asserts that cities can be conceived as ecosystems and dissipative structures with the emergence of collective properties and self-organization processes. Methods for understanding complexity of contemporary cities and life of human systems are thus investigated.

The rhythms of technology and nature are out of phase. This fact underlies the global environmental crisis. Man-made perturbations, even small local ones, can trigger large-scale effects. To reinstate an alliance between humans and nature, as described by Prigogine, the father of evolutionary physics, it is necessary to learn to observe the general behaviour and evolution of real systems, including human systems in their context.

The theories of chaos and complexity can help us to understand these systems: all natural and man-made processes on our planet have a common matrix and are interconnected. Evolutionary physics is the study of the emergence of novelty from the complex fabric of relationships of which we are part. It explains the formation of living structures and their evolution in a dynamic world. Dissipative structures, steady state systems, self-organization, fluctuations and feedback are some of the concepts considered by the authors in their treatment of complex systems such as climate, society, economies and cities. Evolutionary science opens new development prospects for cities in the framework of sustainability.

Pumain, Denise and Juste Raimbault. Perspectives on Urban Theories. arXiv:1911.02854. Systems geographers Denise, a senior Parisian polyscholar (bio below) and Juste, now at University College London, Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, post a chapter to appear in Theories and Models of Urbanization (Springer, 2020) in its Lecture Notes in Morphogenesis series. By a broad view, after 21st century studies which found that city settlements innately take upon and hold to active nonlinear, complex, nested network, fractal scale, animate features, a new phase of their integrative notice and adaptation is now underway. Similar projects are forming in Japan and China, check this eprint site. See also, for example Urban Scaling Laws by Diego Rybski, et al in Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science (46/9, 2019).

At the end of the five years of work in our GeoDiverCity program, we brought together a diversity of authors from different disciplines. Each person was invited to present an important question about the theories and models of urbanization. They are representative of a variety of currents in urban research. Rather than repeat here the contents of all chapters, we propose two ways to synthesize the scientific contributions of this book. In a first part we replace them in relation to a few principles that were experimented in our program, and in a second part we situate them with respect to a broader view of international literature on these topics. (Abstract)

Denise Pumain trained in geography at Ecole Normale Supérieure; she was a Lecturer and Professor from 1970 at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, Director of the European Research Group Spatial Simulation for Social Sciences, 2006–2013, Principal Investigator of ERC GeoDiverCity (Google), 2011–2016, and other such projects. Her scientific interest is to develop an evolutionary theory of urban societies by transferring concepts and models from self-organizing complex systems.

Raimbault, Juste. Cities as They Could Be: Artificial Life and Urban Systems. arXiv:2002.12926. The University College London systems geographer (search) continues his re-imaginations of human proto-cellular habitations by way of the latest complex self-similar network dynamics. See also Hierarchy and Co-evolution Processes in Urban Systems (2001.11989), Multi-dimensional Urban Network Percolation (1903.07141) and Modeling Interactions between Transportation Networks and Territories (1902.04802). Into 2021, see A Multiscale Model of Urban Morphogenesis by JR at (2103.17241).

The metaphor of cities as organisms has a long history in urban planning, and a few urban modeling approaches have explicitly been linked to Artificial Life. We propose in that paper to explore the extent of Artificial Life and Artificial Intelligence application to urban issues, by constructing and exploring a citation network of around 225,000 papers. It shows that most of the literature is indeed application of methodologies and a rather strong modularity of approaches. We finally develop ALife concepts which have a strong potential for the development of new urban theories. (Abstract)

Reggiani, Aura and Peter Nijkamp, eds. Complexity and Spatial Networks. Berlin: Springer, 2009. Aura Reggiani, University of Bologna and Peter Nijkamp, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, are senior systems economists. The volume is significant of its kind with these main sections: Complexity, Evolution, and Simplicity in Space, Evolutionary Networks in a Socio-Economic Context, and Empirical Aspects of Network Complexity in the Space-Economy. A typical chapter is The “Thermodynamics” of the City Evolution and Complexity Science in Urban Modelling, by Sir Alan Wilson, Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University of London. This is also Michael Batty’s group, who contributes with Lucien Benguigui and Efrat Blumenfeld-Lieberthal the chapter Macro and Micro Dynamics of the City Size Distribution: The Case of Israel. Another example is Complex Adaptive Systems through Time and Space: Alberta Power Generation, by Kevin Seel and Nigel Waters. Altogether, something deeply generative, wholly self-similar seems to be going on, often said akin to statistical physics, across human urban and rural habitations, suggestive of “evolutionary directions and unifying perspectives.”

The primary objectives of this chapter are twofold: first, to offer a review of progress in urban modelling using the methods of statistical mechanics; and second, to explore the possibility of using the thermodynamic analogy in addition to statistical mechanics. We can take stock of the “thermodynamics of the city” not in the sense of its physical states – interesting though that would be – but in terms of its daily functioning and its evolution over time. We will show that these methods of statistical mechanics and thermodynamics illustrate the contribution of urban modelling to complexity science and form the basis for understanding the evolution of urban structure. (Alan Wilson, 11)

Ribeiro, Ana Sofia, et al. Structural and Temporal Patterns of the First Global Trading Market. Royal Society Open Science. August, 2018. From this worldwide 21st complexity century, A. S. Ribeiro, University of Evora, Francisco Santos, University of Lisbon, Amelia Polonia, University of Porto, and Jorge Pacheco, University of Minho, Portugal along with Flavio Pinheiro, MIT analyze Portugal’s early nautical ventures, circa 1550 – 1610, by way of dynamic network topologies to find mathematical regularities even in this olden instance. As the Abstract alludes, they are suggestive of universal features which pervade all manner of commerce and finance.

Little is known about the structural patterns and dynamics of the first global trading market, which emerged during the sixteenth century as a result of the Iberian expansion, let alone how it compares to today's global financial markets. Here we build a representative network using information contained in 8725 Bills of Exchange from that time, which were digitalized into an online database. We show that the resulting temporal network exhibits a hierarchical, highly clustered and disassortative structure, with a power-law dependence on the connectivity that remains remarkably robust. Our analysis shows that, despite major turnovers in the number and nature of the links — suggesting fast adaptation in response to the geopolitical and financial turmoil experienced at the time — its overall characteristics remain robust and virtually unchanged. The methodology developed here demonstrates the possibility of building and analysing complex trading and finance networks originating from pre-statistical eras, enabling us to highlight the striking similarities between the structural patterns of financial networks separated by centuries in time. (Abstract)

Riberio, Fabiano and Diego Rybski. Mathematical Models to Explain the Origin of Urban Scaling Laws. arXiv:2111.08365. Federal University of Lavras, Brazil and Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research Germany systems ecologists enter more views about how to appreciation these prevalent human habitations altogether as recurrent complex network emergences.

The quest for a theory of cities that could offer a systematic way to manage them is a top priority, given humanities increasing urbanization. Here, we review the main mathematical models in the literature that seek to explain the origin and emergence of urban scaling, such as similarities and connections between them. The models in this paper obtain different premises from densification, geometry on to a hierarchical organization and socio-network properties. (Excerpt)

Ribiero, Fabiano and Vinicius Netto. Urban Scaling Laws. arXiv:2404.02642. In this chapter for a Compendium of Urban Complexity, a Universidade Federal de Lavras (UFLA), Brazilphysicist and a Research Centre for Territory, Transports and Environment (CITTA), University of Porto, Portugal architect chronicle the structural presence of self-similarities across large and smaller human habitations.

Understanding how size influences the internal characteristics of a system is a crucial concern. Concepts like scale invariance, universalities, and fractals find application in biology, physics, and particularly urbanism. Relative size impacts how cities form and function economically and socially. For example, what are the pros and cons of larger cities? Do they offer more opportunities and higher incomes than smaller ones? To address such issues, we utilize theoretical tools from scaling theory to quantify how a system's behavior changes across macro to micro scales. Drawing parallels with biology and spatial economics, this chapter explores recent discoveries, ongoing progress, and new questions regarding urban scaling.

Rickles, Dean. Econophysics and the Complexity of Financial Markets. Hooker, Cliff, ed.. Philosophy of Complex Systems. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2011. For this encyclopedia, the University of Sydney physicist and philosopher achieves a current survey of this 21st century reconception of commerce that courses from neoclassic models to complex systems, probability distributions, statistical physics, natural laws, and onto scaling, universality, and criticality, all very organic one might add.

It is unfortunate that a more precise definition of a ‘complex system’ is still not agreed upon: there are almost as many definitions as there are discussions….However, it is reasonably safe to assume a kernel that these diverse accounts share. This kernel involves a triplet of characteristics (I hesitate to call them necessary conditions):
• A (unit) complex system must contain many subunits. • These subunits must be interdependent (at least some of the time). • The interactions between the subunits must be nonlinear. (534)

If we are talking about an adaptive complex system then we should add the following condition: • The individual subunits modify their properties and behaviour with respect to a changing environment resulting in the generation of new systemic properties that ‘reflect’ the change that the environment has undergone. If we are talking about a self-organizing adaptive complex system then we should also add: • The individual subunits modify their own properties and behaviour with respect to the properties and behaviour of the unit system they jointly determine — in other words, there is ‘downward causation’ operating from the systemic properties to the subunits’ properties. (535)

Rickles, Dean. Econophysics for Philosophers. Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics. 38/4, 2007. A review essay of 11 books on nonlinear economics, broadly conceived, which provides a good tutorial to the nascent field. But, as the quotes convey, an inferred realization of a constant, nested recurrence from atoms to Amazon has not yet been appreciated.

Moreover, I think that philosophers should take a good look at the field since it is, prima facie, rather shocking to see how concepts, methods, and models are being taken from such areas of physics as condensed matter physics, quantum field theory and gauge theory and applied to financial markets. (950) In physics, scaling laws are explained (in some cases) via collective behavior amongst a large number of mutually interacting components. The components in this financial case would simply be the market’s ‘agents’ (traders, speculators, hedgers, etc.). The idea is that in statistical physics, systems that consist of a large number of interactings parts often are found to obey ‘universal laws’ – laws independent of microscopic details, and dependent on just a few macroscopic parameters. (954)

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