Open AccessFacing urban complexity: towards cognitive modelling. Part 1. Modelling as a cognitive mediator
Author(s) -
Sylvie Occelli
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
cybergeo
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.16
H-Index - 16
ISSN - 1278-3366
DOI - 10.4000/cybergeo.4179
Subject(s) - novelty , cognition , cognitive science , field (mathematics) , theme (computing) , process (computing) , computer science , computational model , rhetorical question , management science , epistemology , psychology , data science , sociology , artificial intelligence , engineering , social psychology , linguistics , philosophy , mathematics , neuroscience , pure mathematics , operating system
Over the last twenty years, complexity issues have been a central theme of enquiry for the modelling field. Whereas contributing to both a critical revisiting of the existing methods and opening new ways of reasoning, the effectiveness (and sense) of modelling activity was rarely questioned. Acknowledgment of complexity however has been a fruitful spur new and more sophisticated methods in order to improve understanding and advance geographical sciences. However its contribution to tackle urban problems in everyday life has been rather poor and mainly limited to rhetorical claims about the potentialities of the new approach. We argue that although complexity has put the classical modelling activity in serious distress, it is disclosing new potentialities, which are still largely unnoticed. These are primarily related to what the authors has called the structural cognitive shift, which involves both the contents and role of modelling activity. This paper is a first part of a work aimed to illustrate the main features of this shift and discuss its main consequences on the modelling activity. We contend that a most relevant aspect of novelty lies in the new role of modelling as a cognitive mediator, i.e. as a kind of interface between the various components of a modelling process and the external environment to which a model application belongs