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A Sourcebook for the Worldwide Discovery of a Creative Organic Universe
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VII. Our Earthuman Ascent: A Major Evolutionary Transition in Individuality

3. Planetary Physiosphere: Anatomics, Economics, Urbanomics

Cliff, Oliver, et al. Investigating Spatiotemporal Dynamics and Synchrony of Influenza Epidemics in Australia: An Agent-Based Modelling Approach. arXiv:1806.02578. We note this entry by University of Sydney and IBM Research, Melbourne complexity theorists including Mikhail Prokopenko to report on nascent abilities which first quantifies an independent mathematical and geometric domain being found to underlie and characterize all manner of social phenomena. With this novel source and guidance specified, analyses, mitigations and then a new prevention phase can be effected. See also On Critical Dynamic and Thermodynamic Efficiency of Urban Transformations by this group at arXiv:1806.03758.

In this paper we present ACEMod, an agent-based modelling framework for studying influenza epidemics in Australia. The simulator is designed to analyse the spatiotemporal spread of contagion and influenza spatial synchrony across the nation. The individual-based epidemiological model accounts for mobility patterns and human interactions derived from the 2006 Australian census and other data sources. Using this approach, we are able to synthesise epidemics in Australia with varying outbreak locations and severity. We investigate the spatiotemporal profiles of these epidemics, both qualitatively and quantitatively, via incidence curves, prevalence choropleths, and epidemic synchrony. This analysis exemplifies the nature of influenza pandemics and facilitates future planning of effective intervention, mitigation and crisis management strategies. (Abstract)

Cogdell, Christina. Toward a Living Architecture?: Complexism and Biology in Generative Design. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. The UC Davis chair of design studies achieves a book-length survey of this multi-faceted endeavor, which harks back to Frank Lloyd Wright, Paolo Soleri, Christopher Alexander and others. It’s broad intent is to conceive and put into practice an aware human abidance of person and community which draws from and continues natural, organic vitalities. The vital volume gathers an array of dreamers and doers such as Rachel Armstrong, Achim Menges, Michael, Weinstock and many more so to identify, orient and exhibit going forward, with notice of biomimicry, sustainable, green, urban plan, and more case studies. See also Architectural Digest for special issues about morphogenesis, social metabolism, self-organized patterns to avail nature’s best ideas.

Toward a Living Architecture? is the first book-length survey of the emerging field of generative architecture and its nexus with computation, biology, and complexity. Christina Cogdell reviews the sciences this springs from such as complex systems, evolutionary theory, genetics and epigenetics, and synthetic biology. In a narrative that moves from the computational toward the biological and from current practice to visionary futures, Cogdell uses life-cycle analysis to parse the material, energetic, and pollution differences between different digital and biological design and construction approaches.

Courtat, Thomas, et al. Mathematics and Morphogenesis of the City. arXiv:1010.1762. French systems scientists (Catherine Gloaguen and Stephane Douady co-authors), in this October 2010 posting, propose a way to rightly quantify and appreciate our local to large urban habitats as living entities, which would add as a further stage of evolution’s nested emergence.

Cities can be compared to living organisms. They are out of equilibrium, opened systems that never stop developing and sometimes die. The city's growth is guided by needs in local distribution and in communication among its parts. The local geography can be compared to a shell constraining its development. In brief, a city's current layout is a step in a running morphogenesis process. Thus cities display a huge diversity of shapes and none of traditional models from random graphs, complex networks theory or stochastic geometry takes into account geometrical, functional and dynamical aspects of a city in the same framework. We present here a global mathematical model dedicated to cities that permits describing, manipulating and explaining cities' overall shape and layout of their street systems. This streets-based framework includes an algebraic formalism, a static analysis of cities' main features (topology of first and second order, anisotropy, streets scaling) and a dynamical model which from simple general rules can reproduce a large diversity of cities. (Abstract)

Cristelli, Matthieu, et al. Critical Overview of Agent-Based Models for Economics. Mallamace, Francesco and Eugene Stanley, eds. Complex Materials in Physics and Biology. Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2012. An extensive, typical chapter in these Proceedings of the International School of Physics “Enrico Fermi,” held at Varenna on Lake Como, Italy, July 2010, by Matthieu Cristelli with Luciano Pietronero and Andrea Zaccaria, University of Rome physicists. As the next Preface quote notes, the meeting theme was to explore how a union of earlier statistical physics with later complex systems sciences can aid novel insights to an inherently dynamical nature and society. In regard, its stated emphasis was on “universality and scaling” as this evident iteration graces every domain. The cited paper indeed goes on to express the presence of a “self-organized criticality” across commercial and financial behaviors.

Recent years have seen surprising connections develop between physics and such re search fields as mathematics, chemistry, biology, medicine, and even economics. These connections now constitute the fascinating research area known as complex materials and systems. Statistical physics is key in exploring this new expanding field because it is able to show how phenomena and processes long thought to be unrelated can, by means of few unifying concepts, be given a common description. By generalizing methods previously used to order phenomena in simple systems, statistical physics enables us to understand real-world phenomena comprised of complex materials—e.g., biomolecules, polymers, granular substances, glasses, water, membranes, and interfaces—or exhibiting complex processes—e.g., dynamical arrest, chaos, turbulence, network propagation, epidemic spreading, biological functioning, and economic fluctuations. At its current stage of development, this generalizing approach is supported by two conceptual pillars: scaling and universality. (Book Preface, xv)

Crosato, Emanuele, et al. On Critical Dynamics and Thermodynamic Efficiency of Urban Transformations. Royal Society Open Science. October, 2018. As realizations proceed that neural and social systems have a natural affinity and aim to seek and reside in an optimal balance of order and openness, University of Sydney complexity theorists including Mikhail Prokopenko report their presence throughout active city life. See also Thermodynamics and Computation during Collective Motion near Criticality by this collaborative group in Physical Review E (97/012120, 20180).

Urban transformations within large and growing metropolitan areas often generate critical dynamics affecting social interactions, transport connectivity and income flow distribution. We develop a statistical–mechanical model of urban transformations, exemplified for Greater Sydney, and derive a thermodynamic description highlighting critical regimes. We consider urban dynamics at two time scales: fast dynamics for the distribution of population and income, modelled via the maximum entropy principle, and slower dynamics evolving the urban structure under spatially distributed competition. Using the Fisher information, we identify critical thresholds and quantify the thermodynamic cost of urban transformation. Finally, we introduce the notion of thermodynamic efficiency of urban transformation, as the ratio of the order gained during a change to the amount of required work, showing that this measure is maximized at criticality. (Abstract excerpt)

D’Acci, Luce, ed. The Mathematics of Urban Morphology. Springer: Birkhauser, 2019. The editor is a Polytechnic University of Torino urban planner. This is a latest volume about ongoing projects to study, design and create human abidements from close locales to a megacities based on organic metabolic, morphogenetic, diverse/unity, energetic, and sustainable features. Its main sections are Fractals, Cellular Automata, Complexity, Other Quantifications and Humanistic and Multidisciplinary Aspects. Chapters include A Fractal Approach to Explore Australian Urban Form and Neighborhood Scales, Foundations of Cellular Automata and Complexity Theory, Space Syntax: A Network Configuration, and Taking Cities as a Coherent Whole. Herein the emphasis is on nested networks, self-organized liveliness, pattern and process language, self-similarities, and more. See also, for example, The Handbook of Urban Morphology (Wiley, 2018) and Urban Morphology (Springer 2016) and Theories and Models of Urbanization edited by Denise Pumain (Springer 2020).

This edited volume provides a resource for urban morphology, the study of urban forms and structures, offering a vital mathematical perspective. The first part covers fractals and how self-similar structures sort themselves through competition. This is followed by cellular automata, and how they generate fractal forms. The third part focuses on networks such as street topologies, while the fourth presents complexity in relation to urban structures. A variety of quantitative models are cited as study examples.

Decker, Ethan, et al. Energy and Material Flow Through the Urban Ecosystem. Annual Review of Energy and the Environment. 25/685, 2000. The Keywords for this article are: megacity biogeochemistry, city succession, industrial metabolism, air pollution, systems simulations. A good study of how large, dense human assemblies can be properly appreciated as a viable organism.

Depersin, Jules and Marc Barthelemy. From Global Scaling to the Dynamics of Individual Cities. arXiv:1710.09559. In the 2000s and 2010s, urban settlements have become another manifest exemplar (along with brains, languages, genomes and all else) of nature’s complex, fractal, network self-organization. University of Paris Saclay physicists here attest to their universally recurrent presence across all manner of towns and countries. See also Barthelemy’s book The Structure and Dynamics of Cities (Cambridge, 2016), and Topological Characteristics of World Cities at 1709.08244.

Scaling has been proposed as a powerful tool to analyze the properties of complex systems, and in particular for cities where it describes how various properties change with population. The empirical study of scaling on a wide range of urban datasets displays apparent nonlinear behaviors whose statistical validity and meaning were recently the focus of many debates. We discuss here another aspect which is the implication of such scaling forms on individual cities and how they can be used for predicting the behavior of a city when its population changes. This strong path-dependency prohibits the existence of a simple scaling form valid for all cities and shows that we cannot always agglomerate the data for many different systems. (Abstract excerpt)

Dillon, Michael and Julian Read. Global Liberal Governance: Biopolitics, Security and War. Millennium: Journal of International Studies. 30/1, 2001. From the field of political science, a rethinking of world civilization in terms of spontaneously organized complex adaptive systems.

Domingues, Guilherme, et al. City Motifs as Revealed by Similarity between Hierarchical Features. arXiv:2204.09104. University of Sao Paulo system theorists contribute a comprehensive report to date of common, nested, network topologies across every scale and occasion. The same pattern and process repeats in kind everywhere as it arises from an independent, informative, genotype-like source. Once again in this year (see Nuno Araujo, et al), a robust realization of nature’s ecosmic universalities is achieved.

See also from this group The Universality in Urban Commuting Across and Within Cities by Lei Dong, et al at 2204.12865, A Similarity Approach to Cities and Features by L. Da Costa, Luciano and Eric Tokuda at 2202.08301 and search names on this preprint site.

Several natural and theoretical networks can be broken down into smaller portions, or subgraphs corresponding to neighborhoods. The more frequent of these neighborhoods can be understood as evident motifs, they can serve to provide a better understanding of their overall structures. (Excerpt)

Ferrão, Paulo and John Fernández. Sustainable Urban Metabolism. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013. Paulo Ferrão is Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, and Director of the MIT Portugal Program, and John Fernández is Professor of Architecture at MIT and Director of MIT’s International Design Center. From before and after Frank Lloyd Wright a persistent project has been to perceive human settlements of any size in a truly organic way with their own anatomy, physiology, and nervous system, so as to better conceive and plan. Typical chapters are Urban Metabolism: Defining a Field, Resource Consumption in Cities, Complexity and Dynamics of Urban Systems, Case Studies from Developed Countries. See also for more entries Tigran Haas, ed. Sustainable Urbanism and Beyond (Rizzoli, 2012).

Urbanization and globalization have shaped the last hundred years. These two dominant trends are mutually reinforcing: globalization links countries through the networked communications of urban hubs. The urban population now generates more than eighty percent of global GDP. Cities account for enormous flows of energy and materials—inflows of goods and services and outflows of waste. Thus urban environmental management critically affects global sustainability. In this book, Paulo Ferro and John Fernández offer a metabolic perspective on urban sustainability, viewing the city as a metabolism, in terms of its exchanges of matter and energy. Their book provides a roadmap to the strategies and tools needed for a scientifically based framework for analyzing and promoting the sustainability of urban systems.

Using the concept of urban metabolism as a unifying framework, Ferro and Fernandez describe a systems-oriented approach that establishes useful linkages among environmental, economic, social, and technical infrastructure issues. These linkages lead to an integrated information-intensive platform that enables ecologically informed urban planning. After establishing the theoretical background and describing the diversity of contributing disciplines, the authors sample sustainability approaches and tools, offer an extended study of the urban metabolism of Lisbon, and outline the challenges and opportunities in approaching urban sustainability in both developed and developing countries. (Publisher)

Frankhauser, Pierre. GIS and the Fractal Formation of Urban Patterns. A. Fotheringham and M. Wegener, eds. Spatial Models and GIS. London: Taylor & Francis, 2000. A universal nested geometry is present even on a human social scale. GIS = Geographical Information Systems.

In summary, fractal analysis allows the emergence of spatial organisation to be shown in the course of urban morphogenesis even if the patterns in question are perceived as irregular. Since the emergence of these patterns is not the result of planning but of a highly complex process of socio-economic interaction, we can interpret the process of pattern formation as a process of self-organisation. (135)

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