Category Archives: Hierarchy

Theoretical Filters

Science celebrates the goal of parsimony. Occam’s razor and all that. Indeed I wrote an editorial about this a few years ago in 2010 (click here). The idea rests on assumptions that our best theories are those that strip away … Continue reading

Posted in Complexity, Hierarchy, Information | Leave a comment

A City is Not a Tree: 50th Anniversary Edition

A really nice idea. Michael Mehaffy has put together a superb collection of comments on Chris Alexander’s famous 1965 paper “A City is Not a Tree”. The comments which are presented in slightly longer papers and shorter contributions are from those … Continue reading

Posted in allometry, Complexity, Emergence, Hierarchy, power laws, Scaling | Leave a comment

A multilevel portrait of shrinking urban Russia

A really nice article from Clementine Cottineau, one of our researchers, on how Russia is shrinking (Read in English or French, from Espace Populations Sociétés. Techniques that we may be able to apply in our new Digital Economies research project to shrinking Britain, … Continue reading

Posted in city size, Economies of scale, Hierarchy, Scaling | Leave a comment