Internal vs. External spatial information and cultural emergence in a self-organizing City

Modern, or rather postmodem, cities are characterized by spatial, social and cultural pluralism: the city can be described as a spatial mosaic of coexisting cultural and social groups, some of which are the product of “old” ethnic groups who emigrated to the city as already established cultural groups, while others, and this is the more recent phenomenon, are the dialectical product of the city itself. In a series of previous studies on the city as a self organizing system we have examined various facets of the city's cultural and social dynamics. This was done by means of a family of models we have specifically designed for this purpose. The first model, City, reffered to already established cultural groups. The second model, City- 1, was a planning oriented cell-space model which introduced, in addition to socio-cultural properties of individuals, also their economical status, as well as the changing land value surface of the city. With the third model, City-2, we have examined the possibility that the city dynamics can generate the emergence of a new cultural spatial entity, the present parer further elaborates on the question of social-spatial emergence and investigates the conditions by which changes in individuals' spatial mobility in conjunction with spatial cognitive dissonance entail structural changes in the spatio-cultural composition of the city.