Recent developments in the field of urban analysis and management are investigated in this book. It is a wide-ranging collection of essays on the subject drawn from a long-term project and seminar, held in Italy, to review the state of the art and speculate on the future influence on the "sciences of the city" of the complexity concept. Of particular interest is the variety of points of view, often contrasting, and the attempt to go beyond the conventional approaches to the analysis, and the planning of the city. While focussing mainly on the European (and in particular Italian) context, the discussion is of general relevance and valuable to anyone concerned with the prospects for the city in the new millenium.

1. Introduction.- 1.1 The Guiding Idea Behind the Seminar.- 1.2 The Sciences of the City: A Moment of Crisis?.- 1.3 Some Questions and Initial Replies Emerging from the Seminar.- 1.4 The Concept of Complexity.- 1.5 The Planning of the City.- 1.6 The Papers in this Volume.- References.- Session 1: The City as a Highly Complex Entity.- 2. Cities as Self-Organising Complex Systems.- 3. A Short Discussion of Alternative Approaches to Modelling Complex Self-Organising Systems.- 4. The Possibilities and Limits of Self-Organisation.- 5. On the Foundations of Social Dynamics: An Efficient Mathematical Statement of a General Framework Underlying a Complex Nonlinear Social Determinism, Incorporating a Supra-Observer and a Suprastructure.- 6. Urban Development as a Guided Self-Organisation Process.- 7. Strange Loops, Tangled Hierarchies and Urban Self-Regulation.- 8. The Fractal Geometry of Urban Organisation: Beyond the Crisis of 'Spontaneous Order'.- 9. The Complexity Paradigm in Architecture.- Session 2: The Sciences of the City.- 10. Urban Research and Complexity.- 11. Beyond Complexity in Urban Development Studies.- 12. Model, Plan and Process for the Control of Urban Systems.- 13. Self-Referential Processes of Spatial Integration.- 14. Innovation, Agglomeration and Complexity in Urban Systems.- 15. The Sciences of the City: Analytical Tools and Complexity.- 16. Towards a Semiotic Theory of the City and the Territory as a Landscape.- 17. Assessing Uncertainty and Complexity in Urban Systems.- Session 3: The Planning of the City.- 18. The Nexus Between Analysis and Design: A Case Study of an Uneasy Relationship.- 19. Order and Change, Rule and Strategy.- 20. Selected Issues of Urban Planning.- 21. New Conditions and Requirements for Urban Government.- 22. Town Planning andFluctuations of Rules Covering Time and Space.- 23. China in Search of a New Planning Paradigm.- 24. The Paradoxical Nature of Territorial Change: Science Parks and the Case of Trieste.- 25. Strategic Planning in Italy and the New Local Authority Act: The Master Plan for the City of Venice.- 26. The Art of the Science of the City.- Session 4: The Methodologies of the Urban Sciences.- 27. Design and Use of Information Systems for a Sustainable Complex City.- 28. An Information System for Planning Mobility and Transport in the Metropolis: Proposed Methodology for Setting Up an Integrated Tool for Decision Support.- 29. Urban Information Systems and Sustainable Urban Development.- 30. Towards the Complex City: Approaches and Experiments in Spatial Economics.- 31. Mathematical Models for Simulating Urban Mobility Systems: State of the Art and Lines of Development.- 32. A New Perspective for Methodologies in Spatial and Urban Analysis.- 33. Towards an Environmentally Compatible Mobility in the Region of Stuttgart.- Author Index.- List of Contributors.