Embracing Complexity Theory for Effective Transition to Socially Integrative Cities

This article offers complexity theory as a theoretical framework for a transition into socially integrative cities enabled by digitalization. To increase our understanding of the change processes in cities, we can look to the natural sciences for inspiration–specifically, to complexity theory. According to this theory, the city is a living organism, an ecosystem in which there are close relationships among streams of resources, knowledge, and people. It is a system in which, as in nature, a phenomenon of co-evolution occurs–the emergence of processes and self-organization of all agents in the system–that provides the creation of a new order in a natural evolutionary process. The community is one of the key success factors to make cities more attractive to residents, business, and tourists. Community building needs enabling infrastructure for its creation and development. The city can function as a hub for community-building and, in this way, encourage and enable the natural self-emergence of the residents into different communities of interest. Digital technology makes it possible to develop communities on-line in addition to community-building off-line. The process described in this article includes the conceptual framework that is based on complexity theory and the methodological concept based on Urban Living Labs. In addition, we conducted different types of experiments as part of the empirical action study to validate the theoretical basis of the complexity theory. The experiments include a variety of online activities and a few face-to-face activities. The combination of both online and offine support motivates stakeholders to participate and collaborate in, and register on, the platform. Inspired by complexity theory, we believe that urban planners and policy makers should explore the principles identified in the research of complex adaptive systems, such as emergence, self-organization, co-evolution and their translation into R&D projects as user-centered design (UCD), which inspired us in our development of the online Community of Communities (CoC). We believe that one cannot plan a new city or a new neighborhood or any urban renewal activities without engaging all current and future stakeholders: planners, policy makers, academia, residents, businesses and even tourists. This was our focus too, as described in this chapter. In addition, Tel Aviv’s case study is presented as an example of a process of building an online platform, Community of Communities, that can contribute to the transition towards digital city.