The Challenges of collaboration and democratic participation in turbulent and unsettled times

This paper proposes new key ways to thinking about self-organisation in cities in what, I suggest, are increasingly unsettled and turbulent times. The importance of thinking about self-organisation in cities is all the more salient in the current economic and social context where in many parts of the world there is a withdrawal by the state from public involvement and expenditure, which is impacting on urban citizens, particularly those who are vulnerable, in increasing negative ways. Self-organisation is thus an important and key direction for the future, if cities are to remain inclusive, just and responsive to local needs. Yet such self-organisation can only be truly meaningful and effective if it is conducted collaboratively and democratically, involving as many people as possible, particularly those whose voices are not often heard. In so doing, it is also important to recognise that such involvement and democratic participation are not always consensual; rather conflict is inevitable and potentially positive, as people learnt to recognise their differences, which are often implicated in power, and to negotiate solutions together

Hearing Emergence: Towards Sound-Based Self-Organisation

A fascination for models derived from natural organisation of organisms has a long history of influence in the arts. This paper discusses emergence as a complex behaviour and its manifestations in the sonic domain. We address issues inherent in the use of visual/spatial metaphors for sonic representation and propose an approach based on sound interaction within biological complex systems

City of slums: self-organisation across scales

The city is certainly a fine example of a complex system, where the parts can only be understood through the whole, and the whole is more than the simple sum of the parts. In the present paper we explore the idea that some of these parts are themselves complex systems and the interrelation between complex subsystems with the overall system is a necessary issue to the understanding of the urban complex system. Spontaneous settlements are clear examples of complex subsystems within a complex urban system. Their morphological characteristics combined with their development process are traditionally understood as chaotic and unorganised. And so are Third World cities, traditionally known for their inherent chaotic and discontinuous spatial patterns and rapid and unorganised development process. The paper consists in a brief theoretical analysis developed on the interrelationship between two urban processes across scales: the local process of formation of inner-city squatter settlements and the global process of urban growth. What is the role that spontaneous settlements play in the global dynamics of the city? We explore this issue by analysing experiments of ‘City-of-slums’, an agent-based model that focuses on the process of consolidation of inner-city squatter settlements within a peripherisation process. The paper also includes two previous studies on these topics where the dynamics of these two urban processes are examined as two isolated complex systems and an analysis of the morphological fragmentation of the distribution of spontaneous settlements within the overall city and within the spontaneous settlements themselves. Based on these analyses, we conclude with a brief discussion on the role of self-organisation in the socio-spatial dynamics of Third World cities

Digital Ecosystems: Self-Organisation of Evolving Agent Populations

A primary motivation for our research in Digital Ecosystems is the desire to exploit the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems. Ecosystems are thought to be robust, scalable architectures that can automatically solve complex, dynamic problems. Self-organisation is perhaps one of the most desirable features in the systems that we engineer, and it is important for us to be able to measure self-organising behaviour. We investigate the self-organising aspects of Digital Ecosystems, created through the application of evolutionary computing to Multi-Agent Systems (MASs), aiming to determine a macroscopic variable to characterise the self-organisation of the evolving agent populations within. We study a measure for the self-organisation called Physical Complexity; based on statistical physics, automata theory, and information theory, providing a measure of information relative to the randomness in an organism's genome, by calculating the entropy in a population. We investigate an extension to include populations of variable length, and then built upon this to construct an efficiency measure to investigate clustering within evolving agent populations. Overall an insight has been achieved into where and how self-organisation occurs in our Digital Ecosystem, and how it can be quantified.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, ACM Management of Emergent Digital EcoSystems (MEDES) 200

The Self-Organisation of Innovation Networks

This paper explores the self-organising principles of horizontally-integrated innovation networks. It isshown that such networks can self-organising in environments where the co-ordination and production ofnew knowledge is itself a complex, dynamic and highly non-linear processes. The paper argues thedevelopment of a self-organisation perspective of innovation networks has two advantages. First, itprovides a general framework of dynamic systems in which different strands of a highly fragmentedliterature can be drawn together. Second, formal self-organisation modelling techniques can provideinteresting new insights into the micro-macro processes driving dynamic innovation systems.Section 1 of the paper identifies the four key principles of self-organisation: local interaction, non-linearity,thermodynamic openness and emergence. Section 2 discusses important complementarities between self-organisationtheory and the ‘new’ theory of innovation, with the latter’s emphasis of the systemic nature ofknowledge production within innovation networks containing multiple private and public institutions thatare connected in highly complicated and non-linear ways. This paves the way for a formal model of self-organisinginnovation networks presented in section 3. Section 4 discusses the main properties of theoutputs generated by the model and its novel insights, section 5 summarising and considering the potentialadvantages for current and future research offered by the self-organisation approach.research and development ;

The Self-Organisation of Strategic Alliances

Strategic alliances form a vital part of today's business environment. The sheer variety of collaborative forms is notable - which include R&D coalitions, marketing and distribution agreements, franchising, co-production agreements, licensing, consortiums and joint ventures. Here we define a strategic alliance as a cooperative agreement between two or more autonomous firms pursuing common objectives or working towards solving common problems through a period of sustained interaction. A distinction is commonly made between 'formal' and 'informal' inter-firm alliances. Informal alliances involve voluntary contact and interaction while in formal alliances cooperation is governed by a contractual agreement. The advantage of formal alliances is the ability to put in place IPR clauses, confidentially agreements and other contractual measures designed to safeguard the firm against knowledge spill-over. However, these measures are costly to instigate and police. By contrast, a key attraction of informal relationships is their low co-ordination costs. Informal know-how trading is relatively simple, uncomplicated and more flexible, and has been observed in a number of industries. A number of factors affecting firms' decisions to cooperate or not cooperate within strategic alliances have been raised in the literature. In this paper we consider three factors in particular: the relative costs of coordinating activity through strategic alliances vis-a-vis the costs of coordinating activity in-house, the degree of uncertainty present in the competitive environment, and the feedback between individual decision-making and industry structure. Whereas discussion of the first two factors is well developed in the strategic alliance literature, the third factor has hitherto only been addressed indirectly. The contribution to this under-researched area represents an important contribution of this paper to the current discourse. In order to focus the discussion, the paper considers the formation of horizontal inter-firm strategic alliances in dynamic product markets. These markets are characterised by rapid rates of technological change, a high degree of market uncertainty, and high rewards (supernormal profits) for successful firms offset by shortening life cycles.Strategic Alliances, Innovation Networks, Self-Organisation

Magnetic self-organisation in Hall-dominated magnetorotational turbulence

The magnetorotational instability (MRI) is the most promising mechanism by which angular momentum is efficiently transported outwards in astrophysical discs. However, its application to protoplanetary discs remains problematic. These discs are so poorly ionised that they may not support magnetorotational turbulence in regions referred to as `dead zones'. It has recently been suggested that the Hall effect, a non-ideal magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) effect, could revive these dead zones by enhancing the magnetically active column density by an order of magnitude or more. We investigate this idea by performing local, three-dimensional, resistive Hall-MHD simulations of the MRI in situations where the Hall effect dominates over Ohmic dissipation. As expected from linear stability analysis, we find an exponentially growing instability in regimes otherwise linearly stable in resistive MHD. However, instead of vigorous and sustained magnetorotational turbulence, we find that the MRI saturates by producing large-scale, long-lived, axisymmetric structures in the magnetic and velocity fields. We refer to these structures as zonal fields and zonal flows, respectively. Their emergence causes a steep reduction in turbulent transport by at least two orders of magnitude from extrapolations based upon resistive MHD, a result that calls into question contemporary models of layered accretion. We construct a rigorous mean-field theory to explain this new behaviour and to predict when it should occur. Implications for protoplanetary disc structure and evolution, as well as for theories of planet formation, are briefly discussed.Comment: 18 pages, 16 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA