Cities are complex, self organizing systems by their nature. They have originally emerged and are still developing out of the interactions between many agents that are located and move in space and time. These agents are motivated by a variety of forces ranging from cognitive capabilities and needs to economic considerations, political ambitions, etc., with no central planning force that affects their behavior. These interactions result in many links that create and form the city. These ideas are known in their theoretical aspects from the 1960s (Jacobs, Alexander). However, in the last decades, as a result of the development of complex theories to multi-disciplinary science, a new interest in urban complexity appeared (Batty, Frankhauser, Portugali and others). In the last decade, the study of this field expanded into complex networks and current work examines urban systems as networks and studies their topological characteristics.

The course will present the development of urban complexity from the theories of Jacobs and Alexander, through spatial cognition and the interdependencies between it and the built environment, to computer models that describe the city and its development as complex network.