Cities That Think like Planets: Complexity, Resilience, and Innovation in Hybrid Ecosystems - Marina Alberti

• As human activity and environmental change become increasingly intertwined on a rapidly urbanizing planet, the field of urban ecology offers useful ways of thinking about coupled human and natural systems.
• Marina Albert is at the forefront of this discipline, offering a conceptual framework for uncovering fundamental laws that govern the complexity and resilience of cities. She sees this as key to understanding and responding to planetary change and the evolution of Earth.
• Bridging the fields of urban planning and ecology, Alberti describes a science of cities that works on a planetary scale and links unpredictable dynamics to the potential for innovation. It considers interactions at all scales between people and built environments, and between cities and their larger environments.
• "Cities That Think like Planets" advances strategies for planning a future that may look very different from the present, as rapid urbanization could tip the Earth toward abrupt and nonlinear change.
• Alberti's analyses of hybrid ecosystems, such as self-organization, heterogeneity, modularity, multiple equilibria, feedback, and transformation, may help humans participate in guiding the Earth away from inadvertent collapse and toward a new era of planetary co-evolution and resilience.

Author: Alberti, Marina

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Illustration: n

Language: ENG

Title: Cities That Think like Planets: Complexity, Resilience, and Innovation in Hybrid Ecosystems

Pages: 00232 (Encrypted) / 00232 (Encrypted)

On Sale: 2016-08-11

SKU-13/ISBN: 9780295996660

Age: 22-UP

Reading Level: 17-UP

• Category: Architecture : Planning
• Category: Nature : Ecology