The ideas presented in this book are a conceptual leverage to correct the rigidity of top-down practices and bring the real city, or the city of everyday life, closer to the city of conventional planning. Considering self-organization as the starting point at the base of complex systems, this book tries to understand how specific qualities emerge and evolve from this behavior. For this, the book discusses new ways of looking at and understanding cities by applying holistic methods and approaches based on the conceptual grounds of quantum, fractal, and complexity theories. The book highlights the fact that the information on how to transform and build a city is contained within the city itself. In this regard, some methodological steps to unpack complexities and translate the essential qualities of space into potential generators for city design and planning are provided. The book urges courageous experimentation and proposes a methodology where the computational nature of urban phenomena goes along with historic anthropological ideas, thus emphasizing the characteristics of a specific reality in a model. They do not exclude each other; in fact, they are part of the unbroken web of wholeness. Importantly, the proposed methodology supports gradual and natural coevolution process in the city through combining planned and unplanned actions and the involving multiplicity of actors, impacting on Urban Planning and Design Practice.

In the last few decades, many European and American cities and towns experienced economic, social and spatial structural change. Strategies for urban regeneration include investments in infrastructures for production, consumption and communication, as well as marketing and branding measures, and urban design schemes. Bringing together leading academics from across a range of disciplines, including Douglas Kelbaugh, Ali Madanipour, Saskia Sassen, Gregory Ashworth, Nan Elin, Emily Talen, and many others, Emergent Urbanism identifies the specific issues dominating today’s urban planning and urban design discourse, arguing that urban planning and design not only results from deliberate planning and design measures, but how these combine with infrastructure planning, and derive from economic, social and spatial processes of structural change. Combining explorations from urban planning, urban theory, human geography, sociology, urban design and architecture, the volume provides a comprehensive and state-of-the-art overview, highlighting the complexities of these interactions in space and place, process and design.

Bringing together leading academics from across a range of disciplines, Emergent Urbanism identifies the specific issues dominating today's urban planning and urban design discourse, arguing that urban planning and design not only results from deliberate planning and design measures, but how these combine with infrastructure planning, and derive from economic, social and spatial processes of structural change. Combining explorations from urban planning, urban theory, human geography, sociology, urban design and architecture, the volume provides a comprehensive and state-of-the-art overview, highlighting the complexities of these interactions in space and place, process and design.

Understanding Urbanism presents built environment students with the latest approaches to studying urbanism. The book is written in an accessible and easy-to-understand format by leading urban academics and practitioners with decades of teaching and practical experience. As students move through the chapters, they will develop a critical understanding of the different ways architects, urban and social planners, urban designers, heritage professionals, engineers and other built environment professionals design our cities. Importantly, the book shows how and why the built environment professional of the future will need to work within the Indigenous context of cities in countries like Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Canada.