The many paths of self-organization

By exploring different cultural roots of self-organisation, the paper points out and discusses the lights and shadows of a concept, which is increasingly used both in mainstream theories and in critical thinking. In so doing, the contribution aims at offering a basic framework for containing and giving sense to the various approaches to self-organization (as they emerge from the two issues of Tracce Urbane, n. 3 and 4, dedicated to that topic), yet sufficiently structured to allow orientation among the variants in which the concept is used in relation with the city. The intent is, therefore, also methodological, and concerns the consistence between theories and concepts, and the heuristics we adopt to analyse and explain spatial phenomena and practices.