Zeev Posner Webcast : Read the Summary

Apparent Shape Analysis

The evolution of Israeli cities, constitute a remarkably suitable 'test bed' for the synthesis of a complexity based comprehensive city/culture dynamics.

During the last hundred years, different groups within the population, sometimes possessing dissimilar sets of spatial contexts, were, in order to survive (literally) faced with the task of adapting their differing spatial contexts to the Israeli city that they encountered at the time of their arrival (or at the time that the city became a locus for their activity) or with the task of changing the actual city, i.e. adapting the actual city to their current spatial contexts, enfolded in the Israeli or Palestinian culture.

City dynamics is thus driven by a variety of maintenance decisions of which the decision to change location - migrate - is just one of many.
Nevertheless, the prominence of immigration in the Israeli experience, and the origins of CAS in Physics, has made the study of immigration systems the prime motivation for the application of discrete non linear dynamics – CAS methodology - to culture dynamics and to city dynamics, in particular.
This realization motivated me to develop, as an ongoing project, a comprehensive city analysis based on the functioning of the city as both a location and a memory of culture, on Complexity, and on a city dynamics, that accounts for both changes in location – immigration – and changes in culture (in the shapes of boundaries, depicted, in the actual city) named ASA (apparent shape analysis); and to test its validity on actual changes (of boundaries) which occurred in Israeli cities.

The proposed discussion recounts some insights about CAS (Complex Adaptive Systems) dynamics, gained while developing ASA – (Apparent Shape Analysis).
ASA is an interdependent set of instructions (tool-kit), for analyzing change in a particular city (or any other human settlement) and in its components (i.e. streets, residences, neighborhoods, etc.), based on a comprehensive discrete non linear city dynamics. Changes take place in one system, enfolding both the actual city (depicted as changes in repeating outlines of boundaries), and the 'replacement of the inner world' of spatial decision makers, i.e. in the spatial component of its inhabitants' culture (which can't be depicted directly). However, by making use of general CAS properties, discovered earlier via its application to analysis of phenomena in nature (in the frameworks of Micro-Biology, Ecology, Condensed Matter Physics etc.), ASA maintains that ad-hoc rules connecting adjacent states of a relevant system, enfolded in a particular city-culture pair, at a certain period, can be revealed, depicted and re-used for further analysis.

The dynamics that is the core of ASA, utilizes also former enhancements in the application of complexity, to other socio-ecological systems (mainly economic markets (Arthur) and migration systems (Sonis)). From this point of view, ASA 'represents' the current state of modifications induced in general CAS dynamics, by its application to systems, which include human decision, i.e. where each decision contains a reflection of decisions made by other participants (in a common culture).

The knowledge about complexity in general, which was accumulated in culture/city -dynamics research, can be considered the 'interest' that we owe natural sciences' CAS pioneers, since it hones our understanding of the roles of observation and of coexistence, in the study of complexity.