Abstract
The growing importance of cities as the main locus oh human activities and concentration is discussed, in terms of their role and influence in the earth System. Under this perspective, a vision of the cities as dissipative systems, capable of both gradual change and abrupt reorganizations (catastrophic and anastrophic) is presented, based on the theory of dissipative structures developed by the Nobel Price Ilya Prigogine. It is shown that cities fulfill the basic requirements of dissipative structures and therefore expected to exhibit a number of important dynamic properties. Secondly, the concept of a sustainable city is discussed, and, using a general systems approach, trace the plurality of conceptions of what a sustainable city means to differences in the valuation function used and the definition of the “system city” being considered. Sustainability is taken as social, environmental, and economic, not reducible to mere “green cities”. Finally, the dark aspects of current cities are discussed in association to general global trends and potential scenarios of the future, and the possibility of changing course towards truly sustainable paths is connected with their dissipative systems quality.
Highlights
It is widely recognized that cities play an important role in the Earth System, and that large urban centers are becoming more and more difficult to manage.While some information on urban settlements will be presented here, it is not the purpose of this article to make a review of the information on urban settlements, but to present a frame of reference that could help to pose different questions about the dynamics of urban systems, questions of relevance to their management
The fact that resulting organization after a systemic change is not predictable in dissipative structures, points, in addition to the many uncertainties that are already unfolding, to the urgent need to develop novel planning and management approaches that accept, and navigate with, uncertainty. Whether or not these phenomena are early warning signals of systemic reconfiguration can only be resolved through further observations and scientific research, but the conjecture is in line with the essential dynamics of the Earth System as a dissipative structure, and with the examination of recent trends within a global scenarios framework (Gallopín, 2018)
An hypothetical visualization of what kind of new configurations could arise from the reorganization of the Earth System is the evolution of the global scenarios created by the Global Scenario Group (GSG), available online at https://www.gsg.org/gsgintro.html
Summary
It is widely recognized that cities play an important role in the Earth System, and that large urban centers are becoming more and more difficult to manage. Cities are the locus of information generation and exchange and of political, economic, and social decisionmaking reaching to all corners of the planet, all that associated to deep and pervasive physical impacts. Due to their high population density and connectivity, infectious diseases tend to concentrate within, and disseminate between, urban settlements (the current swift spread of the Covid-19 pandemic being a case in point). The full system of connections, including the terrestrial links, is too complex to depict in a figure in this paper, but it can be appreciated online, for instance, at https://www.todaybyt.com/ 2019/10/internet-map.html. The question explored here: are there general systemic properties of urban systems that could lead to new insights for understanding and managing?
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