Denise Pumain - Böcker

Hierarchy is a form of organisation of complex systems that rely on or produce a strong differentiation in capacity (power and size) between the parts of the system.

Innovation is nowadays a question of life and death for many of the economies of the western world. Yet, due to our generally reductionist scientific paradigm, invention and innovation are rarely studied scientifically. Most work prefers to study its context and its consequences. As a result, we are as a society, lacking the scientific tools to understand, improve or otherwise impact on the processes of invention and innovation. This book delves deeply into that topic, taking the position that the complex systems approach, with its emphasis on ‘emergence’, is better suited than our traditional approach to the phenomenon. In a collection of very coherent papers, which are the result of an EU-funded four year international research team’s effort, it addresses various aspect of the topic from different disciplinary angles. One of the main emphases is the need, in the social sciences, to move away from neo-darwinist ‘population thinking’ to ‘organization thinking’ if we want to understand social evolution. Another main emphasis is on developing a generative approach to invention and innovation, looking in detail at the contexts within which invention and innovation occur, and how these contexts impact on the chances for success or failure. Throughout, the book is infused with interesting new insights, but also presents several well-elaborated case studies that connect the ideas with a substantive body of ‘real world’ information.

The modeling of cities and territories has progressed greatly in the last 20 years. This is firstly due to geographic information systems, followed by the availability of large amounts of georeferenced data – both on the Internet and through the use of connected objects. In addition, the rise in performance of computational methods for the simulation and exploration of dynamic models has facilitated advancement. Geographical Modeling presents previously unpublished information on the main advances achieved by these new approaches. Each of the six chapters builds a bibliographic review and precisely describes the methods used, highlighting their advantages and discussing their interpretations. They are all illustrated by many examples. The book also explains with clarity the theoretical foundations of geographical analysis, the delicate operations of model selection, and the applications of fractals and scaling laws. These applications include gaining knowledge of the morphology of cities and the organization of urban transport, and finding new methods of building and exploring simulation models and visualizations of data and results.

Cities have become the major habitat for human societies. They are also the places where the starkest social inequalities show up. Income, social, land and housing inequalities shape the built environment and living conditions of different neighborhoods of cities, and in return, unequal access to services, environmental quality and favorable health conditions in different neighborhoods and cities fuel the reproduction of interpersonal inequalities.This book examines how inequalities are produced and reproduced both within and between cities. In particular, we review land rent and social segregation theories from diverse disciplinary references and through examples taken from around the world. The attraction of urban centralities, which is further reinforced by the growing financialization of property and urban capital, is also analyzed through the lens of its influence on rent-seeking mechanisms and the ever increasing pressure of population migration.

Interest in scaling laws has grown since the beginning of the 21st century. In both the social sciences and the natural sciences, there is continued astonishment at the increasing inequalities between large and small cities.While social indicators are often thought of as linear measures, in terms of per capita quantities, economies of scale allow us to take account of sublinear relationships or superlinear relationships (amplifications), achieved according to the size of cities. Given the dual challenge facing cities in terms of ecological transition and technological innovation, it is crucial to inform urban policies about the effects of their size on the qualities of cities.Scaling Laws and Urban Systems provides an overview of this new knowledge in terms of growth and adaptation capacities, resource extraction or environmental pollution, as well as the sustainability of the living conditions that cities now offer to the majority of the world’s population.

This book provides a thorough discussion about fundamental questions regarding urban theories and modeling. There are several chapters conveying the answers given by single authors to problems of conceptualization and modeling and others in which scholars reply to their conception and question them.

This book provides a thorough discussion about fundamental questions regarding urban theories and modeling. There are several chapters conveying the answers given by single authors to problems of conceptualization and modeling and others in which scholars reply to their conception and question them.

This monograph presents urban simulation methods that help in better understanding urban dynamics. Over historical times, cities have progressively absorbed a larger part of human population and will concentrate three quarters of humankind before the end of the century. This “urban transition” that has totally transformed the way we inhabit the planet is globally understood in its socio-economic rationales but is less frequently questioned as a spatio-temporal process.  However, the cities, because they are intrinsically linked in a game of competition for resources and development, self organize in “systems of cities” where their future becomes more and more interdependent. The high frequency and intensity of interactions between cities explain that urban systems all over the world exhibit large similarities in their hierarchical and functional structure and rather regular dynamics.  They are complex systems whose emergence, structure and further evolution are widely governed by the multiple kinds of interaction that link the various actors and institutions investing in cities their efforts, capital, knowledge and intelligence. Simulation models that reconstruct this dynamics may help in better understanding it and exploring future plausible evolutions of urban systems. This would provide better insight about how societies can manage the ecological transition at local, regional and global scales. The author has developed a series of instruments that greatly improve the techniques of validation for such models of social sciences that can be submitted to many applications in a variety of geographical situations. Examples are given for several BRICS countries, Europe and United States. The target audience primarily comprises research experts in the field of urban dynamics, but the book may also be beneficial for graduate students.

This monograph presents urban simulation methods that help in better understanding urban dynamics. The high frequency and intensity of interactions between cities explain that urban systems all over the world exhibit large similarities in their hierarchical and functional structure and rather regular dynamics.

Hierarchy is a form of organisation of complex systems that rely on or produce a strong differentiation in capacity (power and size) between the parts of the system.

Innovation is nowadays a question of life and death for many of the economies of the western world. Yet, due to our generally reductionist scientific paradigm, invention and innovation are rarely studied scientifically. Most work prefers to study its context and its consequences. As a result, we are as a society, lacking the scientific tools to understand, improve or otherwise impact on the processes of invention and innovation. This book delves deeply into that topic, taking the position that the complex systems approach, with its emphasis on ‘emergence’, is better suited than our traditional approach to the phenomenon. In a collection of very coherent papers, which are the result of an EU-funded four year international research team’s effort, it addresses various aspect of the topic from different disciplinary angles. One of the main emphases is the need, in the social sciences, to move away from neo-darwinist ‘population thinking’ to ‘organization thinking’ if we want to understand social evolution. Another main emphasis is on developing a generative approach to invention and innovation, looking in detail at the contexts within which invention and innovation occur, and how these contexts impact on the chances for success or failure. Throughout, the book is infused with interesting new insights, but also presents several well-elaborated case studies that connect the ideas with a substantive body of ‘real world’ information.

This book reviews the recent evolutions of cities in the world according to entirely revised theoretical fundamentals of urban systems. It relies on a vision of cities sharing common dynamic features as co-evolving entities in complex systems. Systems of cities that are interdependent in their evolutions are characterized in the context of that dynamics. They are identified on various geographical scales—worldwide, regional, or national. Each system exhibits peculiarities that are related to its demographic, economic, and geopolitical history, and that are underlined by the systematic comparison of continental and regional urban systems, following a common template throughout the book. Multi-scale urban processes, whether local (one city), or within national systems (systems of cities), or linked to the expansion of transnational networks (towards global urban systems) throughout the world over the period 1950–2010 are deeply analyzed in 16 chapters. This global overview challenges urban governance for designing policies facing globalization and the subsequent ecological transition. The answers, which emerge from the diversity of situations in the world, add some reflections on and recommendations to the “urban system framework” proposed in the Habitat III agenda.