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

3. Planetary Physiosphere: Anatomics, Economics, Urbanomics

Urry, John. Global Complexity. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2003. The Lancaster University sociologist extends the “complexity turn” (see also Urry and Fraser in Human Societies) to an international scope where dynamic, iterative, autopoietic, self-making systems can similarly be found.

Global systems can be viewed as interdependent, as self-organizing and as possessing emergent properties. (14)

Viceconti, Marco, et at, eds. The Virtual Physiological Human. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A. 366/2973, 2008. An issue dedicated to “a framework for computational biomedicine” that can “enable investigations of the human body as an integrated whole” vs. previous subdivisions and isolations of maladies, organs, functions, and so on. At once, one might observe the project as if a personal humankind is attending to the fraught creatures from whom it has sprung. But also by a turn, ought not this same approach be applied, as James Lovelock stridently advocates, to a planetary physiology?

Volchenkiv, Dmitri and Philippe Blanchard. Scaling and Universality in City Space Syntax. Physica A. 387/2353, 2008. Researchers at Bielefeld University studied five urban areas –present day Manhattan, Venice and Amsterdam, along with towns of medieval origin – Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Bavaria, and Bielefeld, Germany. In each example the same ‘social dynamic’ and ‘scaling phenomena’ was observed which suggests, as the case everywhere else, universal complex networks and systems equally inform our human habitation.

Universal statistical behavior of space syntax measures uncovers the universality of the creation mechanism responsible for the appearance of nodes of high centrality which acts over all cities independently of their backgrounds. (2354) In urban studies, scaling and universality have been found with a remarkable regularity. (2357) The matching of power-law behaviors (the same scaling exponent) can have a deeper origin in the background dynamical process responsible for such a power-law relation. Being diverse in their sizes, forms, economical and political history, cities display nevertheless the identical scaling behavior and probably share the similar fundamental mechanisms of open spaces creation. (2357)

votsis, Athanasios and Riina Haavisto. Urban DNA and Sustainable Cities. Frontiers in Environmental Science. 7/4, 2019. We cite this entry because these Finnish Meteorological Institute, Helsinki geographers consider how a broadly conceived analog genetic-like source code may help explain many features of smaller and larger dynamic human habitations. See also A Model of Urban Evolution based on Innovation Diffusion by Juste Raimbault at arXiv:2004.15023 for similar views.

The concept of Urban DNA has served to describe how a set of growth parameters may encode the manner in which cities evolve in space and the forms they may assume. The five growth coefficients of the SLEUTH (Slope, Land-use, Exclusion, Urban, Transport, Hillshade) cellular automaton model of land use change are often seen as genetic in kind. It is also important to understand whether urban DNA classes relate to outcomes in terms of livability and sustainability. The results distinguish six such types of cities: multinodal, dispersed cities, with mixed outcomes; multinodal, contiguous, slow-growing; transport-oriented, dispersed, fast-growing; large, buzzy, constrained; dense, contiguous, fast-growing; and transport-oriented, contiguous, interactive cities. (Abstract excerpt)

The paper aims to develop a behavioral taxonomy of cities by discerning their urban DNA and exploring the performance of city types in a variety of livability and sustainability indicators and indices. (1-2) Urban (regional) DNA is an analogy to biological DNA: it consists of growth coefficients similar to how proteins compose biological DNA. The notion has found resonance in urban growth processes which encode rules that dictate how the repetition of elementary socio-spatial entities achieves certain urban forms and urban functions across scales. (3)

Wang, De, et al. Multifractal Analysis of Land Use Pattern in Space and Time. Ecological Complexity. Article in Press, 2010. A team of ecologists and geographers report a case study on the Loess Plateau of China which, as they conclude below, can be seen to suggest common, natural principles that manifest everywhere.

In our paper, three sites from the upper, middle and lower reaches of Yanhe watershed in the Loess Plateau were selected to test the scaling properties of agricultural landscape patterns in 1980, 2000 and 2006 using multifractal Rényi dimensions analysis. We found that: (1) the distributions of cropland, grassland and woodland patterns are multiscaling over nearly four orders of magnitude in scale, whereas water bodies and residential areas are not multifractally distributed, which may result from the resolution of Landsat TM remote sensing images; (2) spatially, the multifractal techniques are capable to uncover subtle differences in land use patterns between different reaches of the watershed that could correspond to their distinct, underlying abiotic and biotic processes; and (3) temporally, the multifractal spectra demonstrate little difference between 1980 and 2000 but a sharp change in 2006, the former depicting the land use patterns in an equilibrium state and the latter the effect of government policies such as large-scale eco-environment conservation programmes starting in the late 20th century. The fact that scaling behaviors exist across a heterogeneous landscape suggests that there may be some simple mechanism that governs agricultural landscape change.

Wei, Yun-Lan, et al. Multifractal Temporally Weighted Detrended Analysis to Quantify Power-Law Cross-Correlation and Its Application to Stock Markets. Chaos. 27/6, 2017. We note this paper in an American Institute of Physics journal by Xiangtan University, China, and Queensland University of Technology, Australia theorists as an example amongst many of how the same universal, mathematic self-similar dynamic seem to apply in each and every scale and instance from quantum and interstellar realms to financial commerce.

White, Roger, et al. Modeling Cities and Regions as Complex Systems: From Theory to Planning Applications. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015. By these mid 2010s it seems that every ascendant, nested strata from cosmos (Aschwanden) to chemistry (Banzhaf) to cities (Batty) has redefined and quantified themselves by way of “self-organizing, complex adaptive systems” (1). These self-similar omic archetypes of interacting agents lately reveal an infinite repetition in kind at each stage and instance. Here Roger White, Memorial University of Newfoundland, with Guy Engelen and Inge Uljee, Flemish Institute for Technological Research, Belgium show how human settlements from villages to a metropolis exemplify these animate phenomena.

Cities and regions grow (or occasionally decline), and continuously transform themselves as they do so. This book describes the theory and practice of modeling the spatial dynamics of urban growth and transformation. As cities are complex, adaptive, self-organizing systems, the most appropriate modeling framework is one based on the theory of self-organizing systems -- an approach already used in such fields as physics and ecology. The book presents a series of models, most of them developed using cellular automata (CA), which are inherently spatial and computationally efficient. It also provides discussions of the theoretical, methodological, and philosophical issues that arise from the models.

Wohl, Sharon. Complex Adaptive Systems & Urban Morphogenesis. Delft: A+BE: Architecture and the Built Environment. Vol. 10, 2018. An Iowa State University College of Design professor of urban design is presently earning a doctorate from the Delft University of Technology. This 240 page posting is her thesis which is online in full at: journals.open.tudelft.nl/index.php/abe/article/view/2397. Google the author and/or TU Delft Architecture about their international program, they are the publisher noted above. By its breadth and depth, it explains how these dynamic topologies as they serve to form, vitalize, and become exemplified by human communities from towns to a metropolis. Circa 2018, as reports here and elsewhere confirm (Geoffrey West), another sense is gained of a universally iterated, self-similar source at creative effect everywhere. Her message is that a novel awareness and implementation of nature’s intrinsic design preferences can inform and guide to much benefit.

This thesis looks at how cities operate as Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS). It focuses on how certain characteristics of urban form can support an urban environment's capacity to self-organize, enabling emergent features to appear that, while unplanned, remain highly functional. The research is predicated on the notion that CAS processes operate across diverse domains: that they are ‘generalized' or ‘universal'. The goal of the dissertation is then to determine how such generalized principles might ‘play out' within the urban fabric. The main thrust of the work is to unpack how elements of the urban fabric might be considered as elements of a complex system and then identify how one might design these elements in a more deliberate manner, such that they hold a greater embedded capacity to respond to changing urban forces. The research is further predicated on the notion that, while such responses are both imbricated with, and stewarded by human actors, the specificities of the material characteristics themselves matter. (Abstract)

Yadav, Pawanesh, et al. Explaining Indian Stock Market through Geometry of Scale free Networks. arXiv:2404.04710. We note this work by Shiv Nadar University, Uttar Pradesh, India mathematicians as an example of how every natural and social domain can be traced to and expressed in complex dynamical system theories. In regard then, these findings once again serve define a double manifest and prescriptive biological reality.

This paper presents an analysis of the Indian stock market using a method based on embedding the network in a hyperbolic space using Machine learning techniques. We claim novelty on four counts. First, the hyperbolic clusters resemble the topological network communities better the Euclidean clusters. Second, we clearly distinguish between periods of market stability and volatility through a statistical analysis of distance and shortest path corresponding to the embedded network. Third, we use the modularity of the embedded network so market changes can be spotted early. Lastly, our approach segregate market sectors thereby underscoring its natural clustering ability. (Abstract)

Yakovenko, Victor and J. Barkley Rosser. Colloquium: Statistical Mechanics of Money, Wealth, and Income. Reviews of Modern Physics. Accepted Papers, May, 2009. Respectively, a University of Maryland physicist and a James Madison University economist review efforts from Auguste Comte in the 19th century to 21st century frontiers to explain and understand human societies, especially commercial activities, by way of physical principles. An extensive bibliography is appended. Companion volumes noted herein, not yet seen by me, are Econophysics and Sociophysics edited by Bikas Chakrabarti, et al (Wiley-VCH, 2006) and Classical Econophysics, Paul Cockshott, et al, eds (Routledge, 2009). But the endeavor remains almost totally male, and seems couched in awkward, unwieldy terms.

The paper reviews statistical models for money, wealth, and income distributions developed in the econophysics literature since the late 1990s. By analogy with the Boltzmann-Gibbs distribution of energy in physics, it is shown that the probability distribution of money is exponential for certain classes of models with interacting economic agents. The majority of the population belongs to the lower class, characterized by the exponential ("thermal") distribution, whereas a small fraction of the population in the upper class is characterized by the power-law ("superthermal") distribution. The lower part is very stable, stationary in time, whereas the upper part is highly dynamical and out of equilibrium. "Money, it's a gas." Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon. (Abstract)

It should be emphasized that econophysics does not literally apply the laws of physics such as Newton’s laws or quantum mechanics, to humans. It rather uses mathematical methods developed in statistical physics to study statistical properties of complex economic systems consisting of a large number of humans.

Yeung, Chi Ho, et al. From the Physics of Interacting Polymers to Optimizing Routes on the London Underground. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 110/13717, 2013. Reviewed more in Universal Principles, Aston University, Birmingham, UK, and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, physicists discern nature’s universal preference for metabolic movement from biochemicals to biocities, and then carry it forth to better design our human vitality.

Zambelli, Stefano and Donald A. R. George, eds. Nonlinearity, Complexity and Randomness in Economics. London: Wiley Blackwell, 2012. A collection originally published in Journal of Economic Surveys. (25/3, 2011), from a project initiated by the University of Trento computational economist Vela Velupillai, to recognize and foster “algorithmic foundations” for this field. Typical chapters are “Towards an Algorithmic Revolution” by Velupillai, “An Algrothmic Information-Theoretic Approach to Financial Markets,” Hector Zenil and Jean-Paul Delahaye, and “Emergent Complexity in Agent-Based Computational Economics” by Shu-Heng Chen and Shu Wang. The dynamical paradigm shift continues apace onto systems economics, nature’s nonlinear genotype are in similar effect everywhere.

[Prev Pages]   Previous   | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14  Next