Emergent Urbanism

Rediscovering Urban Complexity

Stephen Wolfram

The Meaning of Emergent Urbanism, after A New Kind of Science

Submitted by Mathieu Helie on Mon, 05/21/2012 - 16:09, last updated Mon, 05/21/2012 - 22:16

Stephen Wolfram is celebrating the tenth anniversary of the publication of A New Kind of Science, a milestone in the development of complexity science that is more significant than any other for me, as it was reading through that book in 2007 that gave me the motivation and the sense of purpose to begin writing about urbanism and complexity science.

Emergent Urbanism at the University of Montreal

Submitted by Mathieu Helie on Thu, 10/29/2009 - 15:24, last updated Mon, 09/05/2011 - 21:47

I was invited to the complex systems laboratory of the Université de Montréal this week to present emergent urbanism to their twenty-member large research group. Click through to SlideShare in order to see the full text of the presentation under the "notes on" tab. The entire text is in French, however I know a significant share of this website's visitors enjoy French once in a while.

Review of Home by Yann-Arthus Bertrand

Submitted by Mathieu Helie on Tue, 06/09/2009 - 01:27, last updated Sun, 11/06/2011 - 00:59

I often wonder if it would be possible to do any kind of serious study into urban morphology without the help of Google Earth. I know it has been indispensable to my studies, perhaps as indispensable as the microscope is to biologists. Google Earth is our macroscope, it allows us to see what is too large to see with the naked eye.

The Fundamentals of Urban Complexity

Submitted by Mathieu Helie on Mon, 05/11/2009 - 10:00, last updated Sun, 11/06/2011 - 01:02

This is part II in an ongoing series of excerpts of an article set to be published this summer in The International Journal of Architectural Research, tentatively titled The Principles of Emergent Urbanism. Click here for part I, The Journey to Emergence.

The Journey to Emergence

Submitted by Mathieu Helie on Mon, 03/23/2009 - 07:00, last updated Sun, 11/06/2011 - 01:02

This is part I of a series of excerpts of an article to be published in the International Journal of Architectural Research entitled The Principles of Emergent Urbanism. Additional parts will be posted on this blog with the editor's permission until the complete article appears exclusively in the journal's upcoming issue.

Decoding paradise - the emergent form of Mediterranean towns

Submitted by Mathieu Helie on Sun, 12/21/2008 - 19:43, last updated Mon, 04/09/2012 - 15:15

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Serifos in Greece

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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