Free Agents in a Cellular Space

Abstract

From what has been said above follows, first, that we suggest viewing the city as an open, complex and thus self-organizing system, exhibiting phenomena of non-linearity, bifurcation and phase-transition. Second, that cellular automata and cell-space models provide a specifically appropriate infrastructure upon which to construct models of cities as self-organizing systems, and, as heuristic tools to learn their properties. With these suggestions we in fact join the cities surveyed above in Chap. 3; yet our attempt is to go a few steps further. We further suggest that, by and large, most of the ‘cities’ presented in Chap. 3 were constructed by applying to the human domain of cities, urbanism and society, the various notions of self-organization as developed mainly in physics, chemistry and mathematics. What we propose to do instead, in the chapters that form the second part of the book, is not to apply, but to adapt, the notion of self-organization to the human domain of cities and urbanism. As already noted at the end of Chap. 3, we propose to do so by adding to the models human intentionality, hermeneutics and memory — notions which are absent from most of the the cities of Chap. 3, but form the foundations of the cities of social theory in Chap. 2.