Urban designers ‘design across scales’, moving between streetscapes, neighborhoods and entire cities or regions. In this paper we study the urban design process from a conjunction between perspective of Synergetic Inter-Representation Network (SIRN) and Construal Level Theory (CLT). The first refers to a sequential process of interaction between internal representations constructed in the mind~brain and external representations (e.g. the design media) constructed in the world; the second refers to the process of abstraction in terms of psychological distance. Our SIRN-CLT view on scale in urban design sheds new light on the relations between the scale of the design object, the design medium and the design process. We show that urban design deals with hybrid large-scale and complex design objects. An example from the domain of urban design is given to illustrate is view.@en

Self-organization implies that order and regularity can come into being (emerge) spontaneously as a purely bottom-up process. Design implies the exact opposite: that order and organization come into being by virtue of a designer in a top-down manner. In this paper we treat these apparent contraries as a complementary pair, and use the notion of SIRN to show how they may coexist.@en

The rationale of this book follows dilemma (see introduction, this volume): The last four decades have witnessed the emergence of CTC (complexity theories of cities)—a domain of research that applies complexity theories to the study of cities. Studies in this domain have demonstrated that, similarly to material and organic complex systems, cities exhibit the properties of natural complex systems and, that many of the mathematical models developed to study natural complex systems also apply to cities. But there is a dilemma here as cities are large-scale artifacts and artifacts are essentially simple systems. So what makes the city a complex system? To answer this question I first draw attention to the ways in which cities differ from natural complex systems and suggest that, as a result, we have to include the cognitive capabilities of urban agents in theorizing and simulating the dynamics of cities. In particular, I draw attention to the fact that urban agents are typified by chronesthesia, that is, the ability to mentally travel in time, back to the past and forward to the future. From the recognition of this cognitive capability follows, firstly, a novel view on the dynamics of cities and the role of urban planners and designers in their dynamics. Secondly, a potential for a new field of study in which planning and design are not treated as external interventions in an otherwise spontaneous and complex urban process, but rather as integral elements in its dynamics.@en