The Slaving Principle, Circular Causality and the City

In this chapter we scrutinize the Synergetic’s ‘slaving principle’ and ‘circular causality’ as they take place in the dynamics of cities. We show that in the urban realm these two processes are often associated with space-time diffusion processes that in their turn give rise to variations in the nature of the urban order parameter(s). As we show, this is a consequence of the uniqueness of cities as hybrid systems. We then generalize this property descriptively and mathematically by relating it to language as a complex system.