scholarly journals Cooperating community connections: A changing political reality

2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Garth Graham
Keyword(s):  
Systems Theory ◽  
Complex Adaptive Systems ◽  
Adaptive Systems ◽  
Alternative Interpretation ◽  
Democratic Governance ◽  
Community Informatics ◽  
Political Reality ◽  
Complex Adaptive ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Individual

Community Informatics has declared that the global is a federation of locals.  James Quilligan has written an essay to the effect that applying such a definition of global requires a world institution of democratic governance.  Some members of the community of community informatics researchers have come to a similar conclusion.  This essay outlines an alternative interpretation based on complex adaptive systems theory, and with consequent results for a different definition of the individual, the community and their interdependence.  It asks the question – where does the predominance of opinion in community informatics about the changing nature of governance and community reside?

scholarly journals Sensing the City: Legibility in the Context of Mediated Spatial Terrains

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharon Wohl
Keyword(s):  
Systems Theory ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Complex Adaptive Systems ◽  
Adaptive Systems ◽  
Complex Adaptive ◽  
Complex Adaptive Systems Theory ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The City

Smartphones, with their “pervasive presence” in contact with our bodies, have come to act as sensory prosthetics that mediate our experience of the city. They activate new possibilities of navigating the urban, such that we can find exactly what we want, rather than what has been placed before us. This article argues that smartphone technologies produce a more fluid engagement with urban space: where space is not so much “given” as “enacted.” In this context, notions of “legibility” take on new algorithmic and virtual forms. Thus, according to Hamilton and colleagues, where “the legible city waited to be read, the transparent city of data waits to be accessed.” Here, stable features dissolve as urban space becomes increasingly fluid and contingent, no longer limited by static patterns of inhabitation. Instead, how we move and where we move shift in accordance with the kinds of urban resources being activated at any given location, at any given moment, and in conjunction with the shifting vicissitudes of the crowd. In this context, the virtual (in its technological definition of cyber-enabled or -enacted space) mediates and activates the virtual (in its philosophical definition pertaining to the capacities of an entity that may or may not be manifested depending on context). The article considers the implications of this novel spatial mediation using an ontological perspective informed by complex adaptive systems theory, which considers forms and objects not as absolutes but rather as contingent entities activated through interactions.

scholarly journals Organizing Theories for Disasters into a Complex Adaptive System Framework

Urban Science ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 61
Author(s):  
Annetta Burger ◽  
William G. Kennedy ◽  
Andrew Crooks
Keyword(s):  
Human Behavior ◽  
Complex Adaptive Systems ◽  
Adaptive Systems ◽  
Complex Adaptive System ◽  
Disaster Studies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Complex Adaptive ◽  
Interacting Systems ◽  
Individual Actor ◽  
The Individual

Increasingly urbanized populations and climate change have shifted the focus of decision makers from economic growth to the sustainability and resilience of urban infrastructure and communities, especially when communities face multiple hazards and need to recover from recurring disasters. Understanding human behavior and its interactions with built environments in disasters requires disciplinary crossover to explain its complexity, therefore we apply the lens of complex adaptive systems (CAS) to review disaster studies across disciplines. Disasters can be understood to consist of three interacting systems: (1) the physical system, consisting of geological, ecological, and human-built systems; (2) the social system, consisting of informal and formal human collective behavior; and (3) the individual actor system. Exploration of human behavior in these systems shows that CAS properties of heterogeneity, interacting subsystems, emergence, adaptation, and learning are integral, not just to cities, but to disaster studies and connecting them in the CAS framework provides us with a new lens to study disasters across disciplines. This paper explores the theories and models used in disaster studies, provides a framework to study and explain disasters, and discusses how complex adaptive systems can support theory building in disaster science for promoting more sustainable and resilient cities.

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