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Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science pp 1–49Cite as

Self-Organization and the City

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Definition of the Subject

Self-organization is a central property of open and complex systems. While the concept had already appeared in the 1940s, its modern use was pioneered in the 1960s by people such as Haken (1983, 1987) with his theory of synergetics, Prigogine with his notion of dissipative structures (Nicolis and Prigogine 1977; Prigogine 1980; Prigogine and Stengers 1984), and others (see review in Chap. 3.1 Portugali (2000)). Such systems are typically in “a far from equilibrium condition” and exhibit phenomena of chaos, fractal structure, and the like. For a long time, the term “self-organization” was used also as an umbrella name for these theories; nowadays, it is common to refer to these theories as complexity theories.

The notions of self-organization and complexity originated in the sciences, specifically in physics, as a property of natural systems. However, as we shall see below, from the start, they were associated with the city – at the beginning, the city was used...

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Abbreviations

Self-organization:

A property of open and complex systems that achieve their order spontaneously, that is, by means of “self-organization.”

City:

A form of settlement that first emerged in the Near East (the core being Mesopotamia) some 5,500 years ago. Since its first appearance in Mesopotamia, it has diffused in space and time. With colonialism, the Western-European form of city has diffused to the entire world, suppressing on the way other forms of cities (e.g., in South America, East Asia, etc.). In the last few decades, the city has become the most dominant form of settlement: for the first time in human history, more than half of world population lives in cities.

Urbanism:

The term refers to the totality of life in cities: the interrelations between the social structure, culture, economy, politics, architecture, physical morphology, etc. associated with life in cities. The first appearance of cities is thus termed the urban revolution. Most students of urbanism would agree that twenty-first-century society is undergoing a major urban transformation; some describe it as a new urban revolution.

Planning:

Planning is, on the one hand, a basic cognitive capability of humans while, on the other, a profession and research domain termed interchangeably city planning, urban and regional planning, or environmental planning. City planners work and act in the context of planning law and administration, the aim of which is to regulate and control life in cities.

SIRN (synergetic inter-representation network):

An approach to cognitive mapping and urban dynamics suggesting that cities emerge, maintain their order, and change again as a consequence of an ongoing interaction between cognitive maps that are constructed in the mind/brain of humans as internal representations and the city as a collective external representation. This ongoing interaction gives rise to a network; some of whose elements are in the mind/brain while others in the world.

Information deflation, inflation and adaptation:

A view suggesting that Shannon’s notion of information is a property of closed systems and that in complex, self-organizing systems, one has to take into consideration the role of semantic information. Due to semantic information, the process of self-organization often entails information deflation; in some cases, it entails information inflation. The suggestion is that information deflation and inflation are two facets of the process of information adaptation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ESLab (Environmental Simulation Lab), Department of Geography and the Human Environment, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

    Juval Portugali

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    Robert A. Meyers

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Portugali, J. (2017). Self-Organization and the City. In: Meyers, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27737-5_471-2

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