Major transitions in the story of urban complexity

Stephen Marshall and Nick Green

Chapter 4 in Handbook on Cities and Complexity, 2021, pp 64-84 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Our understanding of complexity can be seen as a piecemeal accumulation over time; but seen over the long perspective of the history of thought, it can also be arranged in a series of “major transitions.” In this chapter, we propose six major transitions in understanding, each relating to recognition of a new perspective within which to view urban complexity: that of living beings as complex things; of Homo sapiens as just another species; of “organised complexity" as a “good” thing; of the necessary social dimension of urban complexity; of diversity as a necessary dimension of social complexity, and finally the “wicked” nature of intervention in complexity. These historical transitions paved the way for complexity sciences to be incorporated into theories of cities from the 1990s.

Keywords: Economics and Finance; Geography; Urban and Regional Studies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/view/edcoll/9781789900118/9781789900118.00011.xml (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:18907_4

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().