Christian Walloth – författare

Understanding Complex Urban Systems takes as its point of departure the insight that the challenges of global urbanization and the complexity of urban systems cannot be understood – let alone ‘managed’ – by sectoral and disciplinary approaches alone. But while there has recently been significant progress in broadening and refining the methodologies for the quantitative modeling of complex urban systems, in deepening the theoretical understanding of cities as complex systems, or in illuminating the implications for urban planning, there is still a lack of well-founded conceptual thinking on the methodological foundations and the strategies of modeling urban complexity across the disciplines.

Bringing together experts from the fields of urban and spatial planning, ecology, urban geography, real estate analysis, organizational cybernetics, stochastic optimization, and literary studies, as well as specialists in various systems approaches and in transdisciplinary methodologies of urban analysis, the volume seeks to advance the discussion on multidisciplinary approaches to urban modeling. While engaging with the ‘state of the art’ in their respective fields, the contributions are specifically written for both experts from a broad range of disciplines as well as for urban practitioners who feel the need for new approaches given the uncertainty of current developments.

This book presents atheory as well as methods to understand and to purposively influence complexsystems. It suggests a theory of complex systems as nested systems, i. e.systems that enclose other systems and that are simultaneously enclosed by evenother systems. According to the theory presented, each enclosing system emergesthrough time from the generative activities of the systems they enclose.

Systems are nestedand often emerge unplanned, and every system of high dynamics is enclosed by asystem of slower dynamics. An understanding of systems with faster dynamics,which are always guided by systems of slower dynamics, opens up not only newways to understanding systems, but also to effectively influence them.

The aim and subjectof this book is to lay out these thoughts and explain their relevance to thepurposive development of complex systems, which are exemplified in case studies from an urban system. Theinterested reader, who is not required to be familiar with system-theoreticalconcepts or with theories of emergence, will be guided through the developmentof a theory of emergent nested systems. The reader will also learn about newways to influence the course of events - even though the course of events is,in principle, unpredictable, due to the ever-new emergence of real novelty.

This book is devoted to the modeling and understandingof complex urban systems. This second volume of Understanding Complex UrbanSystems focuses on the challenges of the modeling tools, concerning, e.g., thequality and quantity of data and the selection of an appropriate modelingapproach. It is meant to support urban decision-makers—including municipalpoliticians, spatial planners, and citizen groups—in choosing an appropriatemodeling approach for their particular modeling requirements. The contributorsto this volume are from different disciplines, but all share the same goal:optimizing the representation of complex urban systems. They present anddiscuss a variety of approaches for dealing with data-availability problems andfinding appropriate modeling approaches—and not only in terms of computermodeling.

The selection of articles featured in this volume reflecta broad variety of new and established modeling approaches such as:

- An argument for using Big Data methods inconjunction with Agent-based Modeling;

- The introduction of a participatory approachinvolving citizens, in order to utilize an Agent-based Modeling approach tosimulate urban-growth scenarios;

- A presentation of semantic modeling to enable aflexible application of modeling methods and a flexible exchange of data;

- An article about a nested-systems approach toanalyzing a city’s interdependent subsystems (according to these subsystems’different velocities of change);

- An article about methods that use Luhmann’s systemtheory to characterize cities as systems that are composed of flows;

- An article that demonstrates how the Sen-NussbaumCapabilities Approach can be used in urban systems to measure household well-beingshifts that occur in response to the resettlement of urban households;

- A final article that illustrates how Adaptive Cyclesof Complex Adaptive Systems, as well as innovation, can be applied to gain abetter understanding of cities and to promote more resilient and moresustainable urban futures.