Chaos and chaos: the city as a complex phenomenon

This article - published in Italian in 1993 with the title “Caos e caos: la città come fenomeno complesso” as a contribution in the volume “For the XXI century – an encyclopedia and a project” – is published again in this new section of TeMA Journal, Evergreen, in its literal English translation with the addition of new images. This section aims at drawing the attention of the international scientific community to papers that, despite the passing of time, still present elements of significative scientific interest – insights, anticipations and reflections – enough to deserve careful read back. Abstract To say that the city is a dynamically complex system is to affirm that the city can be traced back to a set of components in relation to each other (system), that the processes of the system cannot be managed and controlled with deterministic tools (complex system) and, lastly, that the future evolution of the city-system cannot be predicted linearly on the basis of knowledge of the initial conditions (dynamically complex system). The degree of complexity reached by the city, as a modern expression of collective life, is such that it is unable to provide a compatible and adequate solution to the problems of the "city-system", which is subject, like all systems, to processes of entropy maximisation.