Introduction to Urban Science: Evidence and Theory of Cities as Complex Systems

Cities, on the other hand, become increasingly multidimensional as they grow in size.

But the way in which complex phenomena are hidden, beyond masking by space and time, is through nonlinearity, randomness, collective dynamics, hierarchy, and emergence—a deck of attributes that have proved ill suited to our intuitive and augmented abilities to grasp and to comprehend.

Modern cities operate under an economic theory that is less than 300 years old, and our theory of evolution is less than 150, so we don’t yet fully understand their implications. We have not developed an overarching meh to energize our cities, to permeate them with a worldview that aligns our economic, technological, and social advances with the we