Spatial design, planning processes and literary works on cities: an ontological approach for integrating heterogeneous knowledge

We propose to study cities as compositions of layers, each layer presenting some characteristic aspect of the city based on some type of ontological classification. The layers and their interconnections differ from city to city; these differences, we believe, can explain what one informally calls the spirit of the city. From this viewpoint, traditional analysis and functional views of cities offer only a partial, and sometimes misleading, understanding of the city because such methods tend to modularize the city without modelling the complexity of the city-system and its variety of composing entities. Modularizing the system does help in some problems, especially if we fix a dimensional scale, but in deciding and implementing changes in a complex system like cities one has to keep the whole system in the picture to be able to foresee the overall impact of the changes. Our approach helps to make clear that designing and planning for a city (e.g. by transforming natural entities or introducing artificial entities) have impacts across a variety of layers. By taking an ontological perspective we can make justice of the general complexity of the city and pave the way to develop integrated ontological models. Finally, we give a look at subjective knowledge, the knowledge that is part of the perspectival view of the city inhabitants. This kind of knowledge is not always valorised in traditional scientific approaches, yet is essential for understanding whether a change can be embraced and supported by the agent community, the living component of the city system.