What Kinds of Cities?

What are natural kinds ?

What are Natural Kinds ?

1. Two Questions Distinguish two questions about natural kinds. First, the naturalness question: what, if anything, makes a natural kind natural? Perhaps the members of a natural kind, unlike the members of an arbitrary group, stand in some natural similarity relation to one another. Perhaps they share an essence or some other natural feature. Or perhaps, as conventionalists argue, the boundari...

What Cities Want

How cities plan future mobility. A study by the Technische Universität München and MAN Engineering the Future – since 1758.

What makes cities complex ?

Schrödinger’s view of life and his suggestion that “Organization is maintained by extracting 'order' from the environment” in fact anticipated the notion of order out of chaos that has become the motto of complexity theory. And indeed, three decades later, in December 8, 1977, Ilia Prigogine (1977) in his Nobel lecture demonstrated that in certain circumstances matter too behave as if it has li...

What kinds of things are psychiatric disorders?

This essay explores four answers to the question 'What kinds of things are psychiatric disorders?' Essentialist kinds are classes whose members share an essence from which their defining features arise. Although elegant and appropriate for some physical (e.g. atomic elements) and medical (e.g. Mendelian disorders) phenomena, this model is inappropriate for psychiatric disorders, which are multi...