Complex Thinking and Urban Space: New Contemporary Challenges

With the advent of the new millennium, different ways of interpreting the “city” described its phenomena of gradual expansion and the rarefaction of increasingly blurred boundaries. With the obsolescence of the traditional concept of “city” and the gradual loss of effectiveness of the very notion of “metropolis”, urban reality has emerged as a less and less circumscribed space with a variable geometry. In this framework, since the 1970s deterministic planning has become deeply fragmented and weaker due to a process that has now possibly peaked. During this process, new ideas have emerged that try to understand how urban space may be understood and oriented: the theory of complexity and the Complexity theories of cities suggest a new vision for urban space design in the 21st century. Therefore, it is necessary to start again from a question: is it possible for a planning system whose principle and structure derive from the nature of the city as a complex system to exist? – in other words, a planning system that is not subjected to predictions and allows design ideas and innovations to flow “bottom-up”? The text addresses the issues also in relation to some crucial issues of the contemporary planning, such as the often debated issue of “urban densification”, suggesting to reason in terms of “explorative scenarios” that consider different parameters and factors, including the one of uncertainty that finally marks a departure from remote past models built on certainties, functional and quantitative approaches.