Keynote Speech

GAMES accompany humans since early days, and yet, as a category, they are impossible to define in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. The reason: they form what Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953) in his Philosophical Investigations has termed a family resemblance category. Cities too are hard to define and for the very same reason: they form a family resemblance category. The resemblances in such categories are determined by logical connections (e.g. analogies) and imaginative connections (e.g. metaphors), that is, by fantasies.

FANTASIES refer to our ability to imagine the non-real and irrational; in contradiction with science whose aim is to reveal the real by means of rationality. This link between science, rationality and reality is the prevalent view that goes back to René Descates’ (1637) “cogito ergo sum”. But there is another view that goes back to Giambattista Vico’s (1725) New Science: ‘Fantasia’, he suggested, is the core property of science. He called this property poetic wisdom and demonstrated how all sciences emerged out of this kind of wisdom.

MINDS. The Mind’s New Science is the title of Howard Gardner’s (1987) account of the history of the young cognitive science that came into being in the mid 1950s. Studies in this new science indicate that rationality and imagination are two basic cognitive capabilities of humans’ mind/brain, that both affect human behavior in general, and in cities. In particular, chronesthesia (Tulving 2002)—the cognitive capability for mental time travel, to the past and to the future, is of specific significance in determining human fantasies, action, planning and design in cities.

CITIES. The last decades have witnessed the emergence of CTC (complexity theories of cities)—a domain of research that applies the various theories of complexity to the study, planning and design of cities. While successful, these applications overlook the fact that cities fundamentally differ from the material and organic systems upon which the theories of complexity are based. They differ, among other things, in that the actions of their elementary parts—the urban agents—are driven by their cognitive capabilities, that is, their perception, cognitive mapping, images and fantasies of their cities.

THE TALK. In this talk I elaborate on the intimate links between games, fantasies, minds and cities as complex systems, and, explore the potential of the various kinds of games as methodological approaches to study cities as complex systems as well as means to plan and design cities.