Project Description

Our society reproduces itself within limits of resources, fluctuating environments, external shocks, and systemic crises, all contributing to uncertainty and hindering decision-making. The nature of these challenges can be clarified through a classic concept in information theory: entropy, a measure of probability in the face of uncertainty and disorder. Societies face entropy all the time. While preparing for the negative effects of entropy is a vital part of how societies become resilient, foster positive entropic effects triggered by innovation and serendipity is key for creative societies. Cities are crucial for both processes. However, cities are part social action, meaning, and physical materiality. There can be divergence between fast-changing systems like actions, and slow-changing systems like the built environment. Urban structures can become a source of noise for volatile action systems. As the merging of social, informational and material networks, cities are constantly subject to internal contradictions between their own subsystems.

This research aims to identify how interactions emerge through the built environment and the potential sources of noises in their coevolution. The hypothesis is that societies resist and manage different forms of entropy through three continuous processes: (a) creating physical and semantic urban structures to support volatile interaction systems, (b) exploring such structures as the social system endures fluctuations, and (c) stressing and improving urban structures in response to such fluctuations through self-improvement mechanisms, like bottom-up collective learning and top-down monitoring capacities in planning. Cities can improve or harm societies' dynamics, reducing or expanding societal demands and externalities because cities have structures that enable and shape such dynamics.

The approach proposed applies information theory to identify the urban conditions of the convergence of actions in cooperation to understand forms of self-organisation in collective life. It develops new computational agent-based models (ABM) to analyse evolving cooperation levels measured as ‘social entropy’ in a large sample of cities worldwide. The approach also deploys such a tool to identify highly entropic urban areas with potentially negative implications for mobility and interaction and draw comparisons between current states and counterfactual

(what-if) scenarios, testing the potential effects of hypothetical changes on social entropy. This pioneering responsiveness enhancement tool and urban sustainability assessment can be particularly useful in cities subject to rapid expansion, structural fragilities and spatial inequalities in mobility and access to opportunities.

Research Team

· Vinicius M. Netto, CITTA FEUP, Universidade do Porto

Financial Support

· Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia | Individual Call to Scientific Employment Stimulus 6th Edition | 2023.07510.CEECIND: R$ 292.112,00

Stage of Progress

· Ongoing (since 25 de Julho 2024)