Introduction

Juval Portugali

pp. 1-2

in: Juval Portugali, Han Meyer, Egbert Stolk, Ekim Tan (eds), Complexity theories of cities have come of age, Berlin, Springer, 2012

Abstract

The notion of complexity theories in the title of this book refers to several theories that originated in the 1960s when physicists such as Hermann Haken and Ilya Prigogine became aware of, and started to study, physical-material systems that exhibit phenomena of emergence, self-organization, history and the like; phenomena that were previously regarded as typifying organic or even socio-cultural systems, but not material systems. These resemblances between phenomena in the animate and inanimate domains were one of the reasons that soon after their emergence complexity theories became a general paradigm that was applied to a variety of domains outside physics, ranging from life sciences to social sciences and the study of cities.

Cited authors

Prigogine Ilya

Haken Hermann