[excerpt] … More than a half a century ago the urban scholar Jane Jacobs offered a scathing indictment of the “pseudo-science” of planning, which seemed, she said, “almost neurotic in its determination to imitate empiric failure and ignore empiric success.”  In the presciently brilliant last chapter of The Death and Life of Great American Cities(1961) she urged planners and architects to re-assess their understanding of “the kind of problem a city is,” and apply the more inductive methods offered by the then-emerging sciences of complexity.

Although Jacobs’ work was widely acclaimed, the effort to put planning and urban design on a more usefully scientific footing has remained, at best, a work in progress.  But in the last decade or so, a remarkable set of advances in related fields has begun to suggest the outlines of a more rigorous “science of cities” – one that, following Jacobs’ advice, goes beyond simple mechanical or statistical formulas, and relies more directly on the iterative, evidentiary methods of medical and biological sciences.