5. Urban Adaptation—Insights from Information Physics and Complex System Dynamics

This chapter addresses and reframes urban adaptation through frontier coevolutionary information physics and complex system dynamic approaches, with an interdisciplinary perspective seamlessly articulating frontier natural, social and technical sciences into a coherent manner through a novel mathematical lingua franca articulating manifold disciplines. In doing so, insights on urban adaptation depart from rethinking to reframing adaptation into full-fledged system dynamic coevolution, thereby reshaping concepts, strengthening procedures, empowering choices to turn insights into actions, to bestow into urban adaptation a novel mathematically robust interdisciplinary framework able to brave the emerging challenges facing the urban socio-environmental dynamics along with its interdependencies across manifold scales and domains ultimately linking to the overall coevolutionary Earth System Dynamics. In methodological terms, a novel robust mathematical edifice is thus provided to both data based and process based system dynamic understanding, design, analytics and decision support. In this sense, the methodological foundations are set to empower a robust synergistic coalition among cutting-edge information physics, nonlinear data analytics and model design, along with expert knowledge of those on the field, leveraging and complementing their voices, insights and operations with innovative robust mathematical, physical, numerical, computational, novel tools and data analytics to drive the design, decision and operation processes in multissectorial urban adaptation terms.