Urban Transvergence: What It Means and Why We Need to Transverge in Knowledge and Practice
The 21st century is the Century of massive Urbanization, of the rise of Megacities and of the apotheosis of Urban sprawl.
Which are the consequences of this change at the global and local scale?
Are we making all is in our possibilities to plan, design and build more liveable Cities?
Can we address the new challenges with #OldTheories and acting as in the past?
Trying to answer from an Urban Planning Scholar and Practitioner point of view I'll try to focus on the essence of the problem: Cities are #ComplexAdaptiveSystems (Holland, 1996) shaped by deep interconnected process from the local to the global level and vice versa and at the same time Cities are home for over 50% of the entire world population.
#ComplexAdaptiveSystems is a way for describe urban systems as constituted by an internal and external environment communicating through an interface: the systems exchange continually information (data, energy, food) with their external environment through multiple interfaces and thanks to their internal processes, are able to reproduce themselves (autopoiesis) and to elaborate, through the mediation of the same interface, the stimulus from the external environment, taking benefits and without changing qualitatively its internal structures (resilience). #ComplexAdaptiveSystems are structured like "collective networks" of "reflective actors" in order to face #OrganizedComplexity: actors involved into a complex adaptive system show an individual behaviour that can be related to the collective behaviour.
Cities can be defined also as problems of organized complexity (Jacobs, 1961) and they are the physical and human direct interface for multiple input and output processes (many would call it economy…). A direct observation of the real situation of Metro areas and Megacities all over the world tells us we're not making all is in our possibilities to plan, design and build more liveable Cities.
The whole cities supply-chain, primarily Food and Energy production, is governed by a market model that produced in the last five decades the greatest and widest-ranging of human failures ever seen: the connection between #MassiveGlobalPollution at all levels (air, high atmosphere, soil, fresh waters, oceans) and #ClimateChange, as the direct consequence, is heading, both on a local and a global scale, to a new and dangerous level we've never seen.
This is why we can't address these new challenges acting as in the past and why we need to make a strategic move because in a rapid and continuous globalization of markets, fluxes of capitals, data, goods and cultures, we're witnessing old problems becoming bigger.
#Cities are growing following rules and principles made for the past centuries but now are under our nose the implications of this insane business. Cities, considered in the past the solution to the problem of giving a functional place to organized society, in our times are often considered the #RealProblem, in terms of impacts on health, natural resources and contribution to #ClimateChange.
I think that in this particular moment not only are Cities the real problem: also if we would be able to define the real kind of problem they are, we hade a good chance to create new and efficient environmental friendly solutions.
The good news is that we have so much studies around in complementary research fields focused on how to better face globalization that can give us fresh ideas and new operational frameworks in particular comparing Cities and Multinational Organizations, that is a comparison between organizations that have a lot in common if we push the point of observation in a cultural perspective.
Again: TransVergence is not only a neologism, it's a new paradigm and mind approach, It's a new perspective.
TransVergence is the key to take a leap forward on studies and practice about "problems of organized complexity", the kind of of problems Cities are.
The aim of this blog is to foster the debate among different disciplines and sciences involved in complex organizations, beyond the cross-fertilization, toward necessary TransVergence in knowledge and practice.
Are we making all is in our possibilities to plan, design and build more liveable Cities?
Can we address the new challenges with #OldTheories and acting as in the past?
Trying to answer from an Urban Planning Scholar and Practitioner point of view I'll try to focus on the essence of the problem: Cities are #ComplexAdaptiveSystems (Holland, 1996) shaped by deep interconnected process from the local to the global level and vice versa and at the same time Cities are home for over 50% of the entire world population.
#ComplexAdaptiveSystems is a way for describe urban systems as constituted by an internal and external environment communicating through an interface: the systems exchange continually information (data, energy, food) with their external environment through multiple interfaces and thanks to their internal processes, are able to reproduce themselves (autopoiesis) and to elaborate, through the mediation of the same interface, the stimulus from the external environment, taking benefits and without changing qualitatively its internal structures (resilience). #ComplexAdaptiveSystems are structured like "collective networks" of "reflective actors" in order to face #OrganizedComplexity: actors involved into a complex adaptive system show an individual behaviour that can be related to the collective behaviour.
The whole cities supply-chain, primarily Food and Energy production, is governed by a market model that produced in the last five decades the greatest and widest-ranging of human failures ever seen: the connection between #MassiveGlobalPollution at all levels (air, high atmosphere, soil, fresh waters, oceans) and #ClimateChange, as the direct consequence, is heading, both on a local and a global scale, to a new and dangerous level we've never seen.
This is why we can't address these new challenges acting as in the past and why we need to make a strategic move because in a rapid and continuous globalization of markets, fluxes of capitals, data, goods and cultures, we're witnessing old problems becoming bigger.
#Cities are growing following rules and principles made for the past centuries but now are under our nose the implications of this insane business. Cities, considered in the past the solution to the problem of giving a functional place to organized society, in our times are often considered the #RealProblem, in terms of impacts on health, natural resources and contribution to #ClimateChange.
I think that in this particular moment not only are Cities the real problem: also if we would be able to define the real kind of problem they are, we hade a good chance to create new and efficient environmental friendly solutions.
The good news is that we have so much studies around in complementary research fields focused on how to better face globalization that can give us fresh ideas and new operational frameworks in particular comparing Cities and Multinational Organizations, that is a comparison between organizations that have a lot in common if we push the point of observation in a cultural perspective.
Again: TransVergence is not only a neologism, it's a new paradigm and mind approach, It's a new perspective.
TransVergence is the key to take a leap forward on studies and practice about "problems of organized complexity", the kind of of problems Cities are.
The aim of this blog is to foster the debate among different disciplines and sciences involved in complex organizations, beyond the cross-fertilization, toward necessary TransVergence in knowledge and practice.
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