| The Sustainable City 2008 |
Fifth International Conference on Urban Regeneration and Sustainability
Overview
Opening Addresses and the Prigogine Award Audience at the Prigogine Award Presentation Professor Carlos Brebbia opened the ceremony in the name of his Institute and as a representative of the Award Committee for the Prigogine Medal. He started by thanking the Abbott, Pastor Igoumenos Angelos Lussaris for allowing the Conference the use of the main hall in the Monastery to hold the Ceremony. He also expressed the gratitude of the organisers to Skiathos Island Municipality, and to its Mayor, Nikos Plomaretis. Professor Brebbia then opened the proceedings by referring to the importance of the Prigogine award, as follows: “The Prigogine Medal was established in 2004 by the University of Siena and the Wessex Institute of Technology to honour the memory of Professor Ilya Prigogine, Nobel Prize Winner for Chemistry, and in the words of Enzo Tiezzi ‘the greatest scientist of the 20th Century’. “Ilya Prigogine was born in Moscow in 1917, and obtained his undergraduate and graduate education in chemistry at the Free University in Brussels. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for his contribution to non-equilibrium thermodynamics, particularly the theory of dissipative structures. The main theme of his scientific work was the role of time in the physical sciences and biology. He contributed significantly to the understanding of irreversible processes, particularly in systems far from equilibrium. The results of his work have had profound consequences for understanding biological and ecological systems. “In the words of Prigogine, ‘The development of a theory permits us to distinguish various levels of time; time as associated with classical or quantum mechanics, time associated with irreversibility and time associated with history through bifunction. I believe that this diversification of the concept of time enables a better integration of theoretical physics and chemistry with disciplines dealing with other aspects of nature.” Prigogine’s ideas established the basis for ecological systems research. The Prigogine Medal to honour his memory is awarded annually to a leading scientist in the field of ecological systems. All recipients so far have been deeply influenced by the work of Prigogine, to the point that they could justly be called his disciples. The recipient of the first medal in 2004 was Professor Sven Jorgensen of the Danish University of Pharmaceutical Sciences. He is well known for this work in Ecology, particularly in systems modelling, ecological engineering, environmental sciences and environmental management of aquatic systems. “Professor Jorgensen serves on many important committees and as Editor of many scientific publications. He has published more than 300 papers and 60 books. His Medal was awarded by the Rector of the University of Siena who called a special congregation in their Aula Magna. “Professor Enzo Tiezzi received the 2005 Medal at the University of Cádiz during an academic ceremony presided over by the Rector of that Institution. Professor Tiezzi studied at the University of Florence where he developed an interest in the then novel field of magnetic resonance and worked on the first MR prototype machine built at that university. “After teaching at Cagliari University, he won a Fullbright Scholarship to Washington University, where he continued working on MR under Professor Sam Weissman of the Physics Department and Professor Barry Commoner of the Department of Biology. This collaboration resulted in several Seminar papers on pioneering development of MR. “Professor Tiezzi taught Physical Chemistry at Florence for several years before being appointed at the University of Siena where he is Full Professor of Physical Chemistry. His outstanding scientific career has been matched by a strong involvement in environmental and social issues, reflecting his deepening commitment to ecology and Prigogine’s ideas. Professor Tiezzi, in addition to numerous papers, has published more than 20 books dealing with scientific topics, as well as humanities and poetry. “Bernard Patten, recipient of the 2006 Medal, is Regent Professor of Ecology at the University of Georgia in the USA. He is a Systems Ecologist and Ecological Modeller interested in the applications of mathematical theory to ecosystems. He formulated a well known environmental theory called “environ theory and analysis” that permits the use of network mathematics to represent and analyse ecosystem networks. “Professor Patten’s publications include many papers on a variety of ecological topics especially main fresh water and wetlands ecosystems. “Robert Ulanowicz, recipient of the 2007 Medal is Professor at the University of Maryland, at the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory. He is a Chemical Engineer by training who specialised on Ecosystems Theory with outstanding results in the field of Complex Ecology. His scientific contributions are renowned in Network Analysis, Information Theory in Ecology, Thermodynamics in Ecology and Causality in Evolving Systems. “Another area of interest for Professor Ulanowicz is the dialogue between science and religion. “Professor Ulanowicz has published more than 150 scientific papers in international journals, and several books, as well as being a member of the editorial board of several international journals.” Professor Brebbia’s words were followed by those of Dr William Blain who, as Deputy Director of Wessex Institute of Technology, is responsible for the organisation of academic events, including those connected with the Prigogine Medal. Dr Blain’s address was as follows: “Ioannis Antoniou is Professor of Analysis and Statistics and Head of the School of Mathematics at the Aristotle University of Thessalonica. “He graduated from the Physics Department of the University of Athens. After Graduation he worked in the Greek Ministry of the Environment on atmospheric pollution measurements and statistical analysis and went to Brussels for his PhD research, where Ilya Prigogine was one of his PhD advisors. His Doctorate Thesis on Relativistic Chaos and Probabilistic Analysis of Complex Systems was the beginning of a fruitful collaboration and friendship with Ilya Prigogine. This work led to a new infinite dimensional algebra which extended the conventional Poincaré algebra of relativity to the explicit construction of a non-unitary transformation relating the non-wave equation with the telegraphist equation. Recently it was shown that this algebra provides a nice counter-example in the theory of non commutative algebras and that our extension of how the Time Operator can be applied to the diffusion equation and even to more general stochastic processes. The age eigenstates provided a new representation of the solution of the diffusion equation where the key issue of evolutionary processes admitting Internal Time is Innovation. Complex systems are qualified as the ones producing new information and innovation. “The relations of the Time Operator with what was known as subdynamics in the 1980’s was the second task that Ilya Prigogine suggested to Ioannis Antoniou after his PhD. Following a remark by J. Jauch that subdynamic expressions are meaningless in the Hilbert Space formulation, it was found that they acquire meaning in suitable extensions of the evolution operators beyond the Hilbert Space framework, to suitable locally convex spaces known also as Rigged Hilbert Spaces. In this framework resonances and decaying states appear as generalized eigenvalues and eigenfunctions of the evolution operators. In fact what underlies subdynamics is spectral theory of operators beyond the Hilbert Space. “These extensions gave no new information for stable and/or integrable systems, but for unstable and/or non-integrable systems they have proved to be intrinsically probabilistic and irreversible. This means that the statistical evolution cannot be reduced to trajectories or wave functions and that the statistical evolution is not a group, but splits naturally into two distinct semigroups. The future semigroup should be compatible with our observations, i.e. should correspond to entropy increase. In this framework irreversibility and probability prove to be intrinsic properties of complex systems and the relation with the Time Operator becomes clear. The age eigenstates are simply related to the resonance states by a generalized Fourier transform. This is just a generalization of the well-known position and momentum representations in quantum mechanics. Examples were found, however, where one can construct the Time Operator of the age eigenstates where the extended spectral decomposition does not exist for analytic functions. This situation, like the position representation, is not equivalent to the momentum representation. All this work provided a new mathematical formulation from the intuitive ideas of Ilya Prigogine which can be summarized with the three keywords he liked to use during his seminars: Irreversibility, Instability, Probability. “The discussion of Irreversibility demands an extension of our mathematical knowledge. These extensions gave rise to a new kind of fuzzy logic of classical and quantum complex systems and provided, moreover, new statistical tools for the analysis and simulation of complex systems. New results have been obtained in several applications: the development of probabilistic control strategies for complex systems, the development of probabilistic filters for the reconstruction of images obtained from Optical Coherence Tomography, remote sensing, 3-D data, and analysis of rare events originating from earthquakes or the stock market.  Prof. I Antoniou (3rd from left) “Professor Antoniou’s work was carried out at the International Solvay Institute of Physics and Chemistry from 1982 until the passing away of Ilya Prigogine in May 2003. Ioannis Antoniou was appointed Deputy Director of the Solvay Institutes in 1994 where he stayed until 2004 when he returned to Greece. Inspired by the vision of Ilya Prigogine, Professor Antoniou is now involved in the statistical analysis of complex networks related to Biomedical Problems and the Internet, as well as in mathematical problems of Complexity. “Thanks to Ilya Prigogine,” Professor Antoniou has explained, “the cleavage between the two cultures does not appear any more. In the new vision of the Universe as an ongoing construction, we are active participants and not passive gears in the cosmic mechanical clock. Prigogine however, was not satisfied from these developments. He felt that we are simply at the end of the prehistory of Science. The new formulation of Complexity paved the way, but did not answer the questions:
Professor Michael Zouboulakis, Vice-Rector of the University of Thessaly then proceeded to award the Prigogine Medal to Professor Ioannis Antoniou for his contribution to the understanding of ecological systems. Professor Carlos Brebbia then invited Professor Antoniou to deliver his special keynote address, a summary of which follows. Professor Antoniou started by discussing the legacy of Prigogine regarding time and complexity. He realised that time was the underlying problem in the communication gap between what Prigogine liked to call the two cultures: the culture of the hard or exact sciences and the culture of the sciences of life. Prigogine also realised that complex structures may emerge out of instability; matter may become ‘alive’ far from equilibrium and that self organisation results in open systems order through environmental fluctuations. “Prigogine”, Professor Antoniou continued, “came to study time and complexity and reached the fundamental problem of time. In his own words “The fact that in chemistry and physics, past and present could play the same role, I find a little strange. It was so much in contradiction to ordinary experience. Everybody knows that tomorrow is not the same as today. Yet chemists and physicists described a universe where present and past were identical, timeless and reversible.” Time is modelled in terms of differential equations which are symmetric; the direction present to future is not distinguishable from the direction present to past. This fact led to many scientists accepting the philosophical view that time is an illusion. The objective world simply is, it never happens. On the other hand, thermodynamics is founded on immovable processes which can be expressed as the future in the direction of entropy increase. “Prigogine,” Antoniou proceeded, “was confronted with two paradoxes:
“The main results of Prigogine’s work were i) the extension of thermodynamics for open systems far from equilibrium resulting in the resolution of the paradox of life by highlighting the constructive role of instabilities in the emergence of complexity out of uniformity; and ii) the identification of dynamic systems which evolve statistically as reversible processes satisfying the law of entropy increase – intrinsically irreversible systems – resolving the paradox of irreversibility and providing new probabilistic assessments of complexity. “The conventional wisdom of mid 20th Century physics,” Professor Antoniou explained, “was the belief that nonlinearities make calculations more complicated and that systems would relax one way or another towards equilibrium. Prigogine’s mentor, De Donde, amongst others indicated the need to extend thermodynamics of open systems far from equilibrium. These systems may receive information communicating with their environment. The entropy of the system becomes the sum of its internal entropy and an entropy flow. When the information flow during the process is high enough, nonlinearities occurs and the system is driven far from equilibrium. This gives rise to bifurcations and structural instabilities due to change of the geometry. Order and new structures emerge due to successive bifurcations. Professor Antoniou illustrated this by referring to cases like chemical reactions, complexity in hydrodynamics, diffusion patterns and others. “The appearance of dissipative structures that achieve order through bifurcations have been confirmed by many experiments. Prigogine’s prediction that weak fields, such as gravitational fields, may influence biochemical reactions at critical points far from equilibrium, for instance, has recently been confirmed by experiments carried out in gravitational space. “Far from equilibrium,” Professor Antoniou explained “evolution is like a flipper game where the ball finds its way among several attractors and repellers. “The significance of Prigogine’s work for the 21st Century is the reconciliation of the two cultures, supported by:
“The main challenges facing us are the interpretation of system biology and medicine within the environment which provides the critical fluctuations. We also need to see phenomena, such as the Internet, as part of our environment and aim to resolve the relationship of mind and body problem. That, briefly, is the legacy of Prigogine.” Conference SessionsFollowing the remarks by Professor Antoniou, the conference was inaugurated with papers covering a wide range of topics, grouped into the following sessions:
Invited PresentationsA series of invited presentations were included in the programme, as follows:
Social Events Conference Dinner at Sustainable City 2008 The Conference banquet took place in a typical Greek Taverna with excellent food and a beautiful view of the bay of Kapinitza. The excellent wines were whites from Santorini and red from the Peloponese, both areas renowned for their quality production. At the end of the meal, they were entertained by a Greek dance troupe, the evening ending with nearly everyone joining in the dance. The event helped to cement friendships and links among the participants. The Conference will be reconvened in 2010, the date and location to be decided soon. Publication of PapersThe proceedings of The Sustainable City V: Urban Regeneration and Sustainability, 768 pp (ISBN: 1-84564-128-3) are available in hard back from WIT Press priced at £253/US$506/€379.50. Orders can be placed by telephone: +44 (0) 238 029 3223, fax: +44 (0) 238 029 2853, e-mail: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or via the WIT Press web site at www.witpress.comPapers from the conference will also be hosted online in the WIT eLibrary as volume 117 of WIT Transactions on Ecology and the Environment (ISSN: 1743-3541). For more details visit the WIT eLibrary at www.witpress.com |
24 - 26 September 2008 
The 5th International Conference on The Sustainable City – Urban Regeneration and Sustainability took place recently on the Greek Island of Skiathos, organised by the Wessex Institute of Technology (WIT), UK; the University of Siena, Italy; and the University of Thessaly, Greece. The Meeting was also sponsored by WIT Transactions on Ecology and the Environment and the International Journal of Sustainable Development and Planning, both published by WIT Press. 
The Sustainable City 2008
| Proceedings |
| WIT eLibrary |
| Next Conference |
Organisers
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Wessex Institute of Technology, UK
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| University of Siena, Italy
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| University of Thessaly, Greece | |
Sponsors
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WIT Transactions on Ecology and the Environment |
| International Journal of Design & Nature and Ecodynamics
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Conference Chairmen
C A BrebbiaWessex Institute of Technology, UK
A Gospodini
University of Thessaly, Greece
E Tiezzi
University of Siena, Italy
International Scientific Advisory Committee
M AnandUniversity of Guelph, Canada
A Bejan
Duke University, USA
D Bogunovich
UNITEC Institute of Technology, New Zealand
E. Douvlou
University of Portsmouth, UK
A Ebel
Institute for Environmental Research, Germany
B Fath
Towson University, USA
G Genon
Politecnico di Torino, Italy
F Gomez Lopera
Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain
M Hartnett
National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland
R Horne
RMIT Univesity, Australia
H Kawashima
Tokyo University, Japan
B Kazimee
Washington State University, USA
A Kirby
Arizona State University West, USA
U Mander
University of Tartu, Estonia
N Marchettini
University of Siena, Italy
R Pulselli
University of Siena, Italy
H Ribeiro
Universidade de Sao Paulo, Brazil
C Rossi
University of Siena, Italy
M Ruth
University of Maryland, USA
I Se Young Hwang
University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
L Serra
University of Zaragoza, Spain
C Solidoro
Ist. Naz. di Oceangrafi - OGS, Italy
W Timmermans
Alterra, The Netherlands
A Van Nes
TU Delft, The Netherlands
P Yildiz
Haceteppe University, Turkey
2008 Conferences
Wessex Institute of Technology
Wessex Institute of Technology
Ashurst Lodge, Ashurst, Southampton SO40 7AA, UK
Tel: +44 (0)238 029 3223 Fax: +44 (0)238 029 2853 Email: wit@wessex.ac.uk