Emergent Urbanism

Rediscovering Urban Complexity

Fractal Cities

The rules for changing rules

Submitted by Mathieu Helie on Wed, 08/05/2009 - 19:12, last updated Mon, 04/09/2012 - 15:27

Paul Romer presents his solution to the problem of underdevelopment in this TED video.

Stanford economist Paul Romer believes in the power of ideas. He first studied how to speed up the discovery and implementation of new technologies. But to address the big problems we'll face this century -- insecurity, harm to the environment, global poverty --  new technologies will not be enough. We must also speed up the discovery and implementation of new rules, of new ideas about how people interact.

A demonstration of complexity in London

Submitted by Mathieu Helie on Sun, 03/09/2008 - 23:52, last updated Sun, 11/06/2011 - 01:14

The immensely productive Physicist-Mathematician-Entrepreneur Stephen Wolfram theorized, based on his studies of cellular automatons in the 1980's, that there exists four classes of physical processes in the universe. Class I is simple continuous behavior (line). Class II is repetitive behavior (checkerboard). Class III is nested, hierarchical-fractal behavior (basic fractals like the Sierpinski triangle). Class IV, the most fascinating, is chaotic behavior (random fractals such as the Mandelbrot Set).

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