Subtitled “A Festschrift for Professor Peter M. Allen” You may say ‘I don’t read Festschrifts, stuffy old things for a bygone age. Wrong ! Always wrong and you must read this one! Because here is someone who has had a massive impact on the way we think about our world of cities and the nature of complexity, and there are many gems to be had here. I first met Peter Allen in 1978 or was it 1979 when he came to Reading on a mission from his mentor the Nobel Prize-winner Ilya Prigogine, the populariser if not the architect of irreversible thermodynamics. This mission was to make contact with urban modellers. But I say all this in one of the memos in this book where we celebrate Peter’s work on the occasion of his 70th and you can read this by clicking on the download.
I also have a chapter in the book called Scaling in City Systems but there is much food for thought in all the contributions here. This is a good book for anyone to read who wishes to see where complexity has come from and where it is destined to go as a movement. You can get the book from the main sources such as Amazon but if you go the publishers web site you can download an extract from the book with its contents that will wet your appetite. I hope the book is seen as more than most Festschrifts which are often left to gather dust but Mark Strathern and James McGlade have done a great job collecting and editing a really nice set of papers. Read on and download the contents and accolades to Peter by clicking here.
