Navigating Complexity

Albert Fuster, Essay, Ezio Manzini, Middle Density, Plug-Ins, Politics and economics, Roger Paez, Urban Paradigms.

Cities, City Making, City Planning, Climate change, Collective identity, Community, COVID-19, Essay, Political implications, Social cohesion, Social contributor, Space-time relationship, Sustainability, Urban Policy, Urban space.

This essay is an excerpt from Plug-ins by Ezio Manzini, Albert Fuster and Roger Paez, published by Actar Publishers.

Cities are hyper-complex natural-social-technical systems – certainly, the most complex systems that humans have helped to generate, and the ones whose evolution has the greatest implications not only for their inhabitants, but for the entire planet. At the same time, the pandemic and the climate crisis have shown us that it is precisely in cities where the greatest problems are created, and where the ideas and practices to deal with those problems can emerge. In other words, cities are a crucial arena to learn how to navigate complexity to arrive at sustainable ways of life. Undoubtedly, cities today are home to the most diverse and challenging technological productions of human beings in terms of infrastructure, resources and management, and they also seem to increasingly define the key aspects of human relations with the environment, political trends and cultural leadership.