scholarly journals Self-organized criticality and urban development

1999 ◽  
Vol 3 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 109-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Batty ◽  
Yichun Xie
Keyword(s):  
Urban Development ◽  
Urban Form ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Phase Portraits ◽  
Critical Threshold ◽  
Spatial Transformation ◽  
Industrial City ◽  
Self Organized ◽  
Self Organized Criticality ◽  
The City

Urban society is undergoing as profound a spatial transformation as that associated with the emergence of the industrial city two centuries ago. To describe and measure this transition, we introduce a new theory based on the concept that large-scale, complex systems composed of many interacting elements, show a surprising degree of resilience to change, holding themselves at critical levels for long periods until conditions emerge which move the system, often abruptly, to a new threshold. This theory is called ‘self-organized criticality’; it is consistent with systems in which global patterns emerge from local action which is the hallmark of self-organization, and it is consistent with developments in system dynamics and their morphology which find expression in fractal geometry and weak chaos theory. We illustrate the theory using a unique space–time series of urban development for Buffalo, Western New York, which contains the locations of over one quarter of a million sites coded by their year of construction and dating back to 1773, some 60 years before the city began to develop. We measure the emergence and growth of the city using urban density functions from which measures of fractal dimension are used to construct growth paths of the way the city has grown to fill its region. These phase portraits suggest the existence of transitions between the frontier, the settled agricultural region, the centralized industrial city and the decentralized postindustrial city, and our analysis reveals that Buffalo has maintained itself at a critical threshold since the emergence of the automobile city some 70 years ago. Our implied speculation is: how long will this kind of urban form be maintained in the face of seemingly unstoppable technological change?

The shape of knowledge redistribution within planning cultures

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 17-31
Author(s):  
Christian Peer
Keyword(s):  
Urban Development ◽  
Urban Form ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
General Concept ◽  
Development Project ◽  
Transformation Process ◽  
The Future ◽  
Dialectical Process ◽  
New Generation ◽  
The City

With the beginning of the 21st century a series of large-scale urban development projects (LUDPs) were planned alongside the transformation or modernization of federal railway stations in Vienna. Herein, in October 2012 the City of Vienna together with the landowner set the course for a telling modified urban development project: the new general concept for the former railway station Wien Nordbahnhof. Just a stone’s throw away from the city’s center a new generation of citizens will find its home close or within the typological setting of an experimental superstructure, that is one of today’s biggest inner-city transformation zones, originally called the future city (“Stadt der Zukunft”). According to the city planners’ intentions the Nordbahnhof will be finished until the year of 2025 after a development process of more than three decades and a multifaceted process of public participation. The long period of development led to illuminating different imaginations of the future city and to a particular materialization of the shift of planning ideology into urban form, which accentuates a dialectical process of transformation. This paper focuses on crucial acts of resistance playing a role for the interplay of democracy and innovation within the transformation process in question.

Modeling Extinction

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. E. J. Newman ◽  
R. G. Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Competitive Exclusion ◽  
Applied Mathematics ◽  
Santa Fe ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Self Organized ◽  
Self Organized Criticality ◽  
Extinction Events ◽  
Mass Extinction Events

Developed after a meeting at the Santa Fe Institute on extinction modeling, this book comments critically on the various modeling approaches. In the last decade or so, scientists have started to examine a new approach to the patterns of evolution and extinction in the fossil record. This approach may be called "statistical paleontology," since it looks at large-scale patterns in the record and attempts to understand and model their average statistical features, rather than their detailed structure. Examples of the patterns these studies examine are the distribution of the sizes of mass extinction events over time, the distribution of species lifetimes, or the apparent increase in the number of species alive over the last half a billion years. In attempting to model these patterns, researchers have drawn on ideas not only from paleontology, but from evolutionary biology, ecology, physics, and applied mathematics, including fitness landscapes, competitive exclusion, interaction matrices, and self-organized criticality. A self-contained review of work in this field.

Über Anti-Struktur, Grenzgänger und Repräsentationssysteme:

Anthropos ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 114 (1) ◽  
pp. 209-222
Author(s):  
Sonja Schüler
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Critical Threshold ◽  
Related Factors ◽  
Critical Potential ◽  
Infrastructure Project ◽  
Common Parlance ◽  
High Dynamic ◽  
Development Area ◽  
The City ◽  
Geographical Characteristics

This contribution examines the so-called ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes, a municipality near the city of Nantes in the Western French department Loire-Atlantique. Officially, the abbreviation ZAD stands for the term “designated development area”, zone d’aménagement différé. For decades the site was intended to be the building zone of a large airport project. The opponents of this infrastructure project reinterpreted the abbreviation ZAD: in their understanding and common parlance it means zone to defend- zone à défendre. Within the scope of large-scale protest against the airport project the site had been occupied since 2009. The article examines whether and to what extent the occupied ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes could be described as a socially critical threshold space. In this context it seeks to explore the socio-critical potential and its spatial components with reference to geographical characteristics, location and ideas related aspects as well as action-related factors. The contribution refers to the situation in the first half of the year 2015, before the official abandonment of the airport project and the evacuation of the site. Due to the high dynamic of the developments within the ZAD the findings discussed in this article should be regarded as a “snapshot”.

scholarly journals The Role of Libraries in the Urban Development

2015 ◽  
pp. 112-120
Author(s):  
Oleg M. Zhadyonov
Keyword(s):  
Urban Development ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Active Element ◽  
Educational Institution ◽  
Tourism Industry ◽  
Library Services ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Urban And Regional Development ◽  
The City

The article is devoted to the issues that are only beginning to be widely discussed among the professionals - what is the role of modern libraries in the urban development, whether the library can and should be the active element affecting the life of local communities, the development of the tourism industry, whether the investments are feasible in the development of the library system.Currently libraries start to be perceived everywhere not only as socially significant cultural and educational institution, but also as a significant agent of urban and regional development. In some cases, the appearance of the library, which is becoming «an icon of the city», is dramatically changing the way of life and the vector of economic development in the region. That’s why the attention of politicians and businessmen in the planning of large-scale urban facilities has increasingly switched to libraries. Numerous studies also confirm the growing popularity and interest to the library services and opportunities among various strata and social groups of population around the world. The libraries themselves and moreover the activities that occur around them, have a significant impact on the urban development - today it is the reality already proved by the analysis.

scholarly journals The Sosio-Economic Impact of Covid-19 Pandemic in Lhokseumawe City

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Angga Syahputra ◽  
Mukhtasar Mukhtasar
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Methods ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Government Policies ◽  
Economic Aspects ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
Industrial City ◽  
The People ◽  
Data Source ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The City

AbstractThe Indonesian government has taken various policies to protect its citizens from the Covid-19 outbreak. Large-Scale Social Restrictions (PSBB) to impose a curfew have become several policies taken by several cities in Indonesia to stop the spread of Covid-19. Since WHO declared a pandemic, Covid-19 has had an impact on all aspects of life including socio-economics. Lhokseumawe is an industrial city which is mostly inhabited by residents from outside the city which is designated as a red zone. Various policies issued, such as the imposition of curfews, prohibitions on gathering in cafes, social distancing, wearing masks, and other policies, generally have no significant impact on socio-economic aspects. For this reason, researchers want to see the impact of Covid-19 on the socio-economic aspects of the people of Lhokseumawe City. The method used in this study used qualitative methods with the main data source obtained from observations, as a complement used literature studies and the results of previous research. As of October 2020, Lhokseumawe is still a red zone, but many people do not heed government policies, even socio-economic activities appear to be running normally. The results also showed that there was no significant change in the socio-economic aspects of the community in Lhokseumawe City. This research also explains important steps that are useful for stakeholders to decide on Covid-19 and anticipate its impact.

scholarly journals Self-organized criticality and the fractal scaling of a predator-prey interaction

1992 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 11-11
Author(s):  
Richard B. Aronson
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Interactive Systems ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Biological Interactions ◽  
Ecological Processes ◽  
The Bahamas ◽  
Fractal Scaling ◽  
Self Organized ◽  
Predation Effects ◽  
Self Organized Criticality

In many cases, it is not possible to explain evolutionary-scale patterns by analogy to ecological processes. However, in at least some cases, biological interactions appear amenable to such extrapolation. The paleobiological literature contains examples of predation, competition, and herbivory in which the dynamics are similar on multiple spatiotemporal scales.Dense populations of epifaunal, suspension-feeding ophiuroids, or brittlestar beds, are widely distributed, but they are rare and are restricted in their habitat distribution. On a small scale (meters to kilometers, hours to days), brittlestar bed distribution in the British Isles and the Bahamas is limited by predatory fishes and crabs. On an intermediate scale (tens to hundreds of kilometers, decades to centuries), predation by seastars may cause cycles of ophiuroid abundance in the western English Channel, beyond the stringent restrictions imposed by fish and crab predators. On a large scale (globally, millions to tens of millions of years), the Jurassic decline of brittlestar beds is associated with the diversification of predatory teleosts, neoselachian sharks, and decapod crustaceans.Small-scale predator-ophiuroid interactions sum to produce analogous intermediate- and large-scale interactions. Predation effects on brittlestar beds appear to be scale-independent, or fractal. Fractal scaling may be a consequence of self-organized criticality, an inherent property of large, interactive systems.

Self-Organized Critical Models

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. E. J. Newman ◽  
R. G. Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Computer Simulations ◽  
Power Law ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Fitness Landscape ◽  
Fitness Landscapes ◽  
Power Law Distribution ◽  
Edge Of Chaos ◽  
Self Organized ◽  
Self Organized Criticality ◽  
Phenotype Space

The models discussed in the last chapter are intriguing, but present a number of problems. In particular, most of the results about them come from computer simulations, and little is known analytically about their properties. Results such as the power-law distribution of extinction sizes and the system's evolution to the "edge of chaos" are only as accurate as the simulations in which they are observed. Moreover, it is not even clear what the mechanisms responsible for these results are, beyond the rather general arguments that we have already given. In order to address these shortcomings, Bak and Sneppen (1993; Sneppen et al. 1995; Sneppen 1995; Bak 1996) have taken Kauffman's ideas, with some modification, and used them to create a considerably simpler model of large-scale coevolution which also shows a power-law distribution of avalanche sizes and which is simple enough that its properties can, to some extent, be understood analytically. Although the model does not directly address the question of extinction, a number of authors have interpreted it, using arguments similar to those of section 1.2.2.5, as a possible model for extinction by biotic causes. The Bak-Sneppen model is one of a class of models that show "self-organized criticality," which means that regardless of the state in which they start, they always tune themselves to a critical point of the type discussed in section 2.4, where power-law behavior is seen. We describe self-organized criticality in more detail in section 3.2. First, however, we describe the Bak-Sneppen model itself. In the model of Bak and Sneppen there are no explicit fitness landscapes, as there are in NK models. Instead the model attempts to mimic the effects of landscapes in terms of "fitness barriers." Consider figure 3.1, which is a toy representation of a fitness landscape in which there is only one dimension in the genotype (or phenotype) space. If the mutation rate is low compared with the time scale on which selection takes place (as Kauffman assumed), then a population will spend most of its time localized around a peak in the landscape (labeled P in the figure).

Living on Past Glories and Future Dreams The Effects of Depopulation on Early Modern Urban Development in the Former Castle Town of Kanazawa

2008 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-294 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Phillipps
Keyword(s):  
Urban Development ◽  
Urban Form ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Central City ◽  
Japan Sea ◽  
Meiji Restoration ◽  
Local Newspapers ◽  
The Impact ◽  
First Time

AbstractDepopulation of urban areas is a serious issue in twenty-first century Japan, as shown by the recent large-scale amalgamation of municipalities and programmes to combat declining central city areas. However, this is not the first time depopulation has had a significant effect on urban development: the decline in castle towns after the Meiji Restoration of 1868 had profound effects on both urban form and development concepts. Kanazawa, once one of the largest cities in Japan, suffered from an initial and long-lasting drop and then a more insidious decline as its Japan Sea coast location cut it off from the bulk of industrial and trade development. This article uses a two-fold approach to examine depopulation: first, an examination of the physical effects of depopulation based on statistical analysis of pre-war land registers shows the patterns of decline and regrowth throughout the modern period. Second, the impact of depopulation on the city's image of itself is examined through period documents such as council records and local newspapers. The need to regain status through population rank became an overarching goal of the urban leaders, and formed the basis of Kanazawa's reactions to the modern era and eventually towards imperialism.

Subtle nonlinearity in popular album charts

1999 ◽  
Vol 02 (03) ◽  
pp. 197-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Alexander Bentley ◽  
Herbert D. G. Maschner
Keyword(s):  
Time Series ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Power Law ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Selective Sampling ◽  
Self Organized ◽  
Self Organized Criticality ◽  
Critical Model ◽  
Power Law Distributions ◽  
Multiplicative Processes

Large-scale patterns of culture change may be explained by models of self organized criticality, or alternatively, by multiplicative processes. We speculate that popular album activity may be similar to critical models of extinction in that interconnected agents compete to survive within a limited space. Here we investigate whether popular music albums as listed on popular album charts display evidence of self-organized criticality, including a self-affine time series of activity and power-law distributions of lifetimes and exit activity in the chart. We find it difficult to distinguish between multiplicative growth and critical model hypotheses for these data. However, aspects of criticality may be masked by the selective sampling that a "Top 200" listing necessarily implies.

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