"Understanding Complex Urban Systems" takes as its point of departure the insight that the challenges of global urbanization and the complexity of urban systems cannot be understood let alone managed by sectoral and disciplinary approaches alone. But while there has recently been significant progress in broadening and refining the methodologies for the quantitative modeling of complex urban systems, in deepening the theoretical understanding of cities as complex systems, or in illuminating the implications for urban planning, there is still a lack of well-founded conceptual thinking on the methodological foundations and the strategies of modeling urban complexity across the disciplines.

Bringing together experts from the fields of urban and spatial planning, ecology, urban geography, real estate analysis, organizational cybernetics, stochastic optimization, and literary studies, as well as specialists in various systems approaches and in transdisciplinary methodologies of urban analysis, the volume seeks to advance the discussion on multidisciplinary approaches to urban modeling. While engaging with the state of the art in their respective fields, the contributions are specifically written for both experts from a broad range of disciplines as well as for urban practitioners who feel the need for new approaches given the uncertainty of current developments.

Guided by the multifaceted relations between city and text, Charting Literary Urban Studies: Texts as Models of and for the City attempts to chart the burgeoning field of literary urban studies by outlining how texts in varying degrees function as both representations of the city and as blueprints for its future development. The study addresses questions such as these: How do literary texts represent urban complexities - and how can they capture the uniqueness of a given city? How do literary texts simulate layers of urban memory - and how can they reinforce or help dissolve path dependencies in urban development? What role can literary studies play in interdisciplinary urban research? Are the blueprints or 'recipes' for urban development that most quickly travel around the globe - such as the 'creative city', the 'green city' or the 'smart city' - really always the ones that best solve a given problem? Or is the global spread of such travelling urban models not least a matter of their narrative packaging? In answering these key questions, this book also advances a literary studies contribution to the general theory of models, tracing a heuristic trajectory from the analysis of literary texts as representations of urban developments to an analysis of literary strategies in planning documents and other pragmatic, non-literary texts.

Guided by the multifaceted relations between city and text, Charting Literary Urban Studies: Texts as Models of and for the City attempts to chart the burgeoning field of literary urban studies by outlining how texts in varying degrees function as both representations of the city and as blueprints for its future development. The study addresses questions such as these: How do literary texts represent urban complexities - and how can they capture the uniqueness of a given city? How do literary texts simulate layers of urban memory - and how can they reinforce or help dissolve path dependencies in urban development? What role can literary studies play in interdisciplinary urban research? Are the blueprints or 'recipes' for urban development that most quickly travel around the globe - such as the 'creative city', the 'green city' or the 'smart city' - really always the ones that best solve a given problem? Or is the global spread of such travelling urban models not least a matter of their narrative packaging? In answering these key questions, this book also advances a literary studies contribution to the general theory of models, tracing a heuristic trajectory from the analysis of literary texts as representations of urban developments to an analysis of literary strategies in planning documents and other pragmatic, non-literary texts.

Understanding Complex Urban Systems takes as its point of departure the insight that the challenges of global urbanization and the complexity of urban systems cannot be understood - let alone 'managed' - by sectoral and disciplinary approaches alone. But while there has recently been significant progress in broadening and refining the methodologies for the quantitative modeling of complex urban systems, in deepening the theoretical understanding of cities as complex systems, or in illuminating the implications for urban planning, there is still a lack of well-founded conceptual thinking on the methodological foundations and the strategies of modeling urban complexity across the disciplines. Bringing together experts from the fields of urban and spatial planning, ecology, urban geography, real estate analysis, organizational cybernetics, stochastic optimization, and literary studies, as well as specialists in various systems approaches and in transdisciplinary methodologies of urban analysis, the volume seeks to advance the discussion on multidisciplinary approaches to urban modeling. While engaging with the 'state of the art' in their respective fields, the contributions are specifically written for both experts from a broad range of disciplines as well as for urban practitioners who feel the need for new approaches given the uncertainty of current developments.

Metropolitan research requires interdisciplinary collaboration in order to do justice to the complexities of metropolitan regions. This volume provides a scholarly and accessible overview of key methods and approaches in metropolitan research from a uniquely broad range of disciplines including architectural history, art history, heritage conservation, literary and cultural studies, spatial planning and planning theory, geoinformatics, urban sociology, economic geography, operations research, technology studies, transport planning, aquatic ecosystems research and urban epidemiology. It is this transdisciplinary perspective that allows metropolitain research to address recent social challenges of urban life, such as mobility, accessibility, or sustainability.