Synergetic Cities I: The Pattern Recognition Approach

Abstract

Synergetics — Haken’s theory of self-organization — is now some 30 years old. Over the years four different approaches have been developed within this body of theory to cope with phenomena of complex systems: the microscopic, the macroscopic, the phenomenological (Haken 1993), and the conceptual or hermeneutic. The first is a “bottom-up” approach, starting with an interaction between the individual parts of the system which, beyond a certain threshold of a control parameter, gives rise to order parameters which then enslave the system. The second is a “top-down” approach typical of cases where a description of some macroscopic properties of the system can be performed, whereas information on the individual parts of the system is not sufficient or doesn’t exist. The macroscopic approach enables one to guess the underlying dynamics by means of the entropy (or information) maximization principle, for example.

By Hermann Haken and the author