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.
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Acknowledgments
The preparation and publication of this book and the conference upon which it is based are the fruits of team-work that included many people: my co-editors, co-organizers and friends, Han Meyer, Egbert Stolk and Ekim Tan; the authors who presented stimulating papers during the conference and later transformed them into full-scale papers; the staff of the Department of Urbanism at TU Delft—Amber Leeuwenburgh, Linda de Vos and Danielle Hellendoorm—who did a great job, first in the organization of the conference, next in its smooth and successful operation and finally in the publication of this book; to the latter should be added Koen van Tienen who did the graphic design for the web and flyers, Yulia Kryazheva who joined the team in the preparation of the conference and helped a lot in its organization, and Diana Ibáñez López who language edited the 20 papers of this book. Finally we should mention KNAW—The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and EFL stitching—The Van Eesteren-Fluck & Van Lohuizen Foundation, for their financial support.
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© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Portugali, J. (2012). Introduction. In: Portugali, J., Meyer, H., Stolk, E., Tan, E. (eds) Complexity Theories of Cities Have Come of Age. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24544-2_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24544-2_1
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