Complexity Approach to Urban Systems

This chapter describes the view that cities are complex adaptive systems (CAS) and discusses some implications of this view, including that simple individual behaviors lead to unanticipated, emergent, system-wide outcomes; that configurations of urban contexts matter when striving to understand the effects of a policy lever; and that urban problems may be “wicked.” We then introduce two research approaches suitable for studying complex urban systems, Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) and Agent-Based Modeling (ABM). The chapter concludes with a discussion of the implications of the knowledge produced by these perspectives on cities and research methods.