City, Complexity and Energy

Abstract

The city is widely perceived, even among the most specialized texts, as one of the principal
disturbing factors or problems in getting a hypothetical sustainable system in the future. This vision
is not only simple, but deeply erroneous, so that from an erroneous premise it turns out that a good
number of environmental strategies develop partial at their best or contradictory at their worst.
Because cities may be nothing but the historical model of occupation of the territory by the human
species and just be the answer to an important environmental rationality. Cities are, from the
beginning of the times, the synthesis of the strategies of our species to slow down the entropic
processes which are inherent in any other ecosystem. And the progressive raising of urban
complexity contributes (as in living beings, as in the rest of the ecosystems) to the above mentioned
slowing down entropy, through the establishment of mechanisms of differentiation from the
environment and of the ways of relationship with it. For no chance one of the most fertile lines in
the history of the town planning has his roots in the sciences of the nature (biology and ecology,
from evolutionary perspectives) and that it may be the loss of the above mentioned line in favor of
the hegemonic functionalism the origin of the systematic development of the deeply unsatisfactory
megalopolis we live in. Nevertheless there are examples of strategies that propose a progressive
rising of complexity in actual cities as an answer to environmental and specifi cally energetic
problems, a complex answer to a complex problem. From our point of view, we have the solution in
front of our eyes, much nearer what many people imagine. Nevertheless, the answer is not going to
be simple at all, and is going to demand a change in our mentality. A new concept, the idea of urban
evolvability is hereby presented as a contribution to this change in the point of view.