Urban Complexity

Urban Complexity
 

Course Introduction

This course picks up where the course ‘Urban Governance and Participation’ ended. The complexity approach to cities and urban governance acknowledges that urban governance actually means working with wicked problems. In an increasingly complex urban society, wicked problems can’t be addressed by one actor – often the state – alone, but rather require  multi-actor coordination in cities. However, urban governance takes place in a much bigger social, cultural, political, and economic context, and in a built environment. Both aspects have considerable impact on how the city develops, so much so that the state and other actors often fail to get a grip on the urban. As students might have observed and experienced already, cities rarely develop as planned. In the course, students will learn how urban development is path dependent, but also features unpredictable change and bifurcation points. This has the important consequence that neither do all cities develop in the same direction and at the same pace, nor do successful ‘recipes’ in one place work in another location. So, how can we understand this complexity and how can we harness it for a more aware urban development and management? During this course, students will learn how to look at cities as Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS), a theoretical perspective which aims to explain why cities evolve as self-organised dynamic networks, constantly adapting to uncertainty and shocks. Complexity sciences offer a conceptual tool to understand urban evolution by knitting (disciplinary) urban theory together.

Objectives

This course enables participants to understand the basic mechanisms driving urban complexity, especially why different (parts of) cities evolve in different directions and at different rates. By the end of the course, participants will be able to apply a complexity perspective to analyse how cities across the world in highly diverse contexts produce a wide range of wicked problems related to sustainability and resilience. 

Course content

The course starts with explaining how urban complexity relates to governance. It subsequently unpacks complexity sciences to better understand and appreciate urban dynamics. We then continue the course by discussing how cities evolve over time, considering the spatial, social, economic, and environmental changes taking place in cities. An understanding of these dynamics also includes an analysis of how cities adapt to shocks, stresses, and uncertainties, as is a necessary step in understanding urban resilience. The course will also offer an introduction to a selection of complexity-informed approaches as they have been applied to cities: simplistic and complex complexity, system thinking and the ‘experimental city’ approach. To meet its objectives, the course combines lectures, workshops, and self- study. In the workshops, students link theory to practical observations.