Hermann Haken - Synergetic Cities: Information, Steady State and Phase Transition: Implications to Urban Scaling, Smart Cities and Planning (Springer Series in Synergetics)

Springer Series in Synergetics

Founding Editor: H. Haken

The Springer Series in Synergetics was founded by Herman Haken in 1977. Since then, the series has evolved into a substantial reference library for the quantitative, theoretical and methodological foundations of the science of complex systems.

Through many enduring classic texts, such as Hakens Through many enduring classic texts, such as Haken'sSynergetics and Information and Self-Organization, Gardiners , Gardiner'sHandbook of Stochastic Methods, Riskens , Risken'sThe Fokker Planck-Equation or Haakes or Haake'sQuantum Signatures of Chaos, the series has made, and continues to make, important contributions to shaping the foundations of the field. , the series has made, and continues to make, important contributions to shaping the foundations of the field.

The series publishes monographs and graduate-level textbooks of broad and general interest, with a pronounced emphasis on the physico-mathematical approach.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/712

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The last decades have witnessed the emergence of complexity theories of cities (CTC)a domain of research that applies the various theories of complexity to the study of cities. As a consequence, there are now several theoretical perspectives on cities as complex systems; synergetic cities is one of them.

Synergetic cities (SC) is a theoretical perspective on cities that commences from the basic principles of synergetics. This is a field of research that deals with principles underlying the processes of self-organization in systems belonging to disciplines ranging from physics over biology and social sciences to the humanities including cognitive science.

The notion of SC that we present in this book has developed gradually out of the collaboration between the two of us. However, our aim in this book is not to summarize past studies but rather to extend the notion of SC and thus the domain of CTC. This, by adding to both three novel components: (1) the concepts of Synergetic Inter-representation Networks (SIRN), Information Adaptation (IA) and their conjunction SIRNIAconcepts that we developed in the past and elucidate the role of cognition in cities. (2) Steady States (StS) that are characteristic of the longue dure of cities, perhaps undergoing a smooth development. (3) Phase Transitions (PT) that are characterized by pronounced qualitative changes of important indicators.

In particular, StS and PT are among the very basic aspects of complexity, which due to the specific development of the discourse on cities as complex systems, have not as yet received sufficient attention. The focus of interest in CTC was (still is) on the bottom-up emergence of new properties or structures in cities. But how/why does suddenly a new property emerges? What happens before and after its emergence? Such questions were largely overlooked in the CTC discourse. This is not the case with other domains (e.g., physics) in which one finds extensive discussions on StS and PT. And indeed, we start discussing PT in cities by means of analogies to case studies in physics, whereas we introduce new theoretical tools to study StS in cities. We then further elaborate the uniqueness of these processes in the dynamics of cities.