The uncontrolled growth of urban areas worldwide is pushing a substantial part of the urban population to the fringes of society, confining them to the unsecure and unhygienic settlements that we call “informal.” These settlements lack in intelligible layout and essential services and infrastructures, thus representing a challenging issue for policy makers and urban designers in the development of renewal programs and strategies. In order to support the facing of these issues through an on-site upgrade approach, this paper argues that walkability deeply affects the functioning of informal settlements, so as to propose that they can be identified as “proximal cities,” which expresses the idea that the vital space in informal settlements has soft boundaries and follows a fuzzy logic. A quantitative analysis, based on a configurational approach, and a qualitative analysis, focused on the morphologic features of the settlements, have been implemented. A comparison of the results shows that this approach is suitable to provide a deeper knowledge on informal settlement and informal society under the assumption of their strict mutual connection. A primal definition of proximal cities, suitable for describing some properties of autopoietic urban systems, emerges from the evidence-based relationships between their spatial and social features. In this respect, a case study has been proposed and discussed.

This paper explores the link between the current vision of the “smart city” and the notion of urban autopoiesis understood as self-organized/managed urban systems. It seeks to highlight how the use of GIS analysis, applied to the study of informal settlements, can provide useful information to understand the smart city paradigm. The paper argues the key idea that a smart city should not be seen only as a high-tech urban environment because the transition to smartness will need major changes in its inner structure. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative GIS analysis methods, this study examines the case of the BaSECo Compound, one of the densest informal settlements in Metro Manila (Philippines), with the aim of both generating a comprehensive morphological analysis of this dynamic urban area as well as contributing to the configurational theory of the smart city. The results suggest that the analysis of autopoietic urban systems could expand our understanding of how the structure of the city could evolve to accommodate the needs of its citizens and creating more resilient and inclusive communities.

The problems related to the management of information increase everyday in several contexts. This process needs of more and more effective and efficient knowledge management techniques. We chose as case study the issue of urban planning and design due to the cultural and scientific innovations, which led in recent years to a completely new interpretation of a city as a system of elements each other connected. In the idea that the urban phenomena are manly driven by the topological structure of the urban space, the science of complex networks is flourishing as a novel reference to include a quantitative modelling approach in territorial planning and design. The paper aim is to give a conceptual framework to integrate the knowledge of the elements composing the city, using an ontology to define, organise and manage them, with the functional potential of the urban space that connects them to each other, stressing the concept of topological structure in terms of configuration. The functional aspects revealed by the configurational analysis of the city-network will be improved and better contextualised by the implementation of an urban ontology-based model. The obtained ontologies are shared using system based on peer-to-peer (P2P) paradigm exposed by a web service.

Urban areas are exposed to many risks from natural sources. Even if these circumstances occur entirely depending on natural events, correspondent consequences and damages that could derive are also connected to anthropic factors. Urban structure, due to its aptitude to influence how people "use" the city, drives human risk exposure in built environment. Working on the city related network to account for it is gaining momentum, leading the quest for a renewed modeling approach to the city. Therefore, it will be proposed a particular network based approach to analyze risk scenarios, appealing to the concept of urban resilience as a net property. Even though it holds in urban contexts independently from the type of calamitous event that can occur, it will be deepened with particular reference to urban flood risk.