First published in 1999, the main feature of this book is its multidisciplinary nature, since the book focuses on the complexity of spatial/ economic networks from several methodological points of view. For this purpose both theoretical and empirical works have been included. The aim of the book is to provide an updated and fresh look at the mentioned issue with innovative and creative papers coming from leading experts belonging to different disciplines. Therefore the book could be considered as an expert and critical guide - through different methodological approaches - to the topic of (complex) networks in the space-economy. All the contributions provide innovative and in some cases provocative elements to the understanding of networks and development over space.

Complex systems analysis has become a fascinating topic in modern research on non-linear dynamics, not only in the physical sciences but also in the life sciences and the social sciences. After the era of bifurcation theory, chaos theory, syn- getics, resilience analysis, network dynamics and evolutionary thinking, currently we observe an increasing interest in critical transitions of dynamic real-world systems in many disciplines, such as demography, biology, psychology, economics, earth sciences, geology, seismology, medical sciences, and so on. The relevance of this approach is clearly re?ected in such phenomena as traf?c congestion, ?nancial crisis, ethnic con?icts, eco-system breakdown, health failures, etc. This has prompted a world-wide interest in complex systems. Geographical space is one of the playgrounds for complex dynamics, as is witnessed by population movements, transport ?ows, retail developments, urban expansion, lowland ?ooding and so forth. All such dynamic phenomena have one feature in common: the low predictability of uncertain interrelated events occurring at different interconnected spatio-temporal scale levels and often originating from different disciplinary backgrounds. The study of the associated non-linear (fast and slow) dynamic transition paths calls for a joint research effort of scientists from different disciplines in order to understand the nature, the roots and the con- quences of unexpected or unpredictable changes in complex spatial systems.

This book reports on the latest, cutting-edge scholarship on integrating social network and spatial analyses in the built environment. It sheds light on conceptualization and Implementation of such integration, integration for intra-city level analysis, as well as integration for inter-city level analysis. It explores the use of new data sources concerning human and urban dynamics and provides a discussion of how social network and spatial analyses could be synthesized for a more nuanced understanding of the built environment. As such this book will be a valuable resource for scholars focusing on city-related networks in a number of ‘urban’ disciplines, including but not limited to urban geography, urban informatics, urban planning, urban sociology, and urban studies.

With the dawn of the twenty-first century comes the awareness that current rapid political-economic-social and technological transformations will affect our of living, by producing new forms of information, communications, common way market, work-style and leisure. In this context, human behaviour will certainly change its 'fixed' parameters. It is likely that the relationships between internal structures and external influences, between individual components and collective behaviour, as well as between multi-scale networks and interrelated dynamics, will show spatio-temporal patterns which will be difficult to predict by means of our usual tools. As a consequence, academic research is increasingly being required to play an active role in addressing new ways of understanding and forecasting the sets of interacting structures, ranging from the technical to the organizational, and from the social to the economic and political levels, while at the same time incorporating concerns about the 'new' economy, environment, society, information and technology. It is now evident that social science - especially spatial and economic scienc- needs innovative 'paths', together with continuous cross-fertilization among the many disciplines involved. In order to investigate these intriguing perspectives, we seem to have embarked on an era of methodological reflections - rather than developing strong theoretical foundations. This volume aims to provide an overview of these new insights and frontiers for theoretical/methodological studies and research applications in the space-economy.

This book argues that complexity theory offers new departures for (spatial-) economic modelling. It offers a broad overview of recent advances in non-linear dynamics (catastrophe theory, chaos theory, evolutionary theory and so forth) and illustrates the relevance of this new paradigm on the basis of several illustrations in the area of space-economy. The empirical limitations - inherent in the use of non-linear dynamic systems approaches - are also addressed. Next, the application potential of biocomputing (in particular, neural networks and evolutionary algorithms) is stressed, while various empirical model results are presented. The book concludes with an agenda for further research.

The Handbook of Regional Science is a multi-volume reference work providing a state-of-the-art knowledge on regional science composed by renowned scientists in the field. The Handbook is intended to serve the academic needs of graduate students, and junior and senior scientists in regional science and related fields, with an interest in studying local and regional socio-economic issues. The multi-volume handbook seeks to cover the field of regional science comprehensively, including areas such as regional housing and labor markets, regional economic growth, innovation and regional economic development, new and evolutionary economic geography, location and interaction, the environment and natural resources, spatial analysis and geo-computation as well as spatial statistics and econometrics.

Even as "network" has become a contemporary keyword, its overuse has limited its analytic usefulness. In the enthusiasm that orbits the concept, the network is too easily taken up as a term that we should already know. Patrick Jagoda claims that we do not, in fact, know networks, in part because of their very ubiquity and variety. His book shows how a range of popular aesthetic forms mediate our experience of networks and yield up greater insight into this critical concept. Each chapter of "Network Aesthetics" considers how a different contemporary genre makes sense of decentralized network structure, from fiction, film, and television to popular videogames such as Introversion's "Uplink," experimental games such as Jason Rohrer's "Between," and emergent transmedia storytelling forms such as "Alternate Reality Games." Jagoda wants to show that network aesthetics, in all of these cases, are not simply the quality of a genre; more substantively, they are a critical corollary to an era in which interconnection has become a key cultural framework. "Network Aesthetics" cuts through the cliches of sublime interconnection and illuminates the ordinary, lived aspects of networked life.