Cross-linkers at growing microtubule ends generate forces that drive actin transport

The actin and microtubule cytoskeletons form active networks in the cell that can contract and remodel, resulting in vital cellular processes such as cell division and motility. Motor proteins play an important role in generating the forces required for these processes, but more recently the concept of passive cross-linkers being able to...

Between Self-organization and Formal Participation: Increasing Tenants’ Influence through Self-management? – A Dutch Case-study

To a large extent, established formal participation schemes fail to deliver on their promise of transferring substantial power to tenants, while self-organized housing remains a niche for those who have a strong inclination and ample resources. Given the rise of renting in Europe, and the intensifying housing crisis, increasing tenants’...

Collective dynamics and pattern formation in systems of communicating cells: Theory and Simulations

How a system of genetically identical biological cells organizes into spatially heterogeneous tissues is a central question in biology. Even when the molecular and genetic underpinnings of cell-cell interactions are known, how these lead to multicellular patterns is often poorly understood. Of particular interest are dynamic patterns such as...

Energy resilience through self-organization during widespread power outages

Resilience of power systems is highly impacted by factors such as increasing severity and frequency of weather events, but also smart grid advances that introduce major operational changes in power systems. Rapidly adapting to these changing circumstances and harnessing the potential of technolo- gical advances is the key to ensuring that power...

False promises of co-production in neighbourhood regeneration: the case of Dutch community enterprises

Many European countries are implementing austerity measures alongside trends of welfare state retrenchment. Entrepreneurial forms of active citizenship are considered as a new form of public management to fill gaps left by spending cuts and to continue neighbourhood regeneration. Inspired by British practices, Dutch citizens are trying to set up...

Using Social Media and Mobile Technologies to Foster Engagement and Self-organisation in Participatory Urban Planning and Neighbourhood Governance

This editorial explores the potential of social media and mobile technologies to foster citizen engagement and participation in urban planning. We argue that there is a lot of wishful thinking, but little empirically validated knowledge in this emerging field of study. We outline key developments and pay attention to larger societal and...

Hyper-morphology: Experimentations with bio-inspired design processes for adaptive spatial re-use

This article is a newer version of a paper originally published in the eCAADe 2013 Conference Proceedings Computation & Performance. Hyper-Morphology is an on-going research outlining a bottom-up evolutionary design process based on autonomous cellular building components. The research interfaces critical operational traits of the natural world ...

Hyper-Morphology: Experimentations with bio-inspired design processes for adaptive spatial re-use

Hyper-Morphology is an on-going research outlining a bottom-up evolutionary design process based on autonomous cellular building components. The research interfaces critical operational traits of the natural world (Evolutionary Development Biology, Embryology and Cellular Differentiation) with Evolutionary Computational techniques driven design...

The City Biosphere: A novel theoretical and experimental methodology for the identification of catalysing mutations in city generation, assembly and development

This paper introduces a new experimental city generation, assembly and development platform, the urban mutations platform. We describe in detail a methodology for modeling urban systems and their dynamics, based on self-organization principles. The urban area is seen as an organism comprised of different “body parts”, the urban subunits. Upon...

Hyper-Morphology: Experimentations with bio-inspired design processes for adaptive spatial re-use

Hyper-Morphology is an on-going research outlining a bottom-up evolutionary design process based on autonomous cellular building components. The research interfaces critical operational traits of the natural world (Evolutionary Development Biology, Embryology and Cellular Differentiation) with Evolutionary Computational techniques driven design...

Multi-level Reconfigurable Self-organization in Overlay Services

Large-scale decentralized systems organized in overlay networks are complex to manage. Such systems integrate organizational complexity in the application-level resulting in low abstraction and modularity in their services. This thesis introduces a multi-level conceptual architecture for overlay services. An overlay service is a large-scale...

Analyzing Inverse Infrastructures using a Complex Adaptive Systems Perspective

The number of inverse infrastructures (Vree, 2003), that is, user-driven and self-organizing infrastructures, is rising and unsettling policies that are foremost tailored to deal with large-scale and centrally-governed infrastructures (Egyedi et al. 2012). To better understand and address this mismatch, Van den Berg (2012) has developed a...

Interdisciplinary process driven performative morphologies: A morphogenomic approach towards developing context aware spatial formations

Architectural praxis is in continuous state of change. The introduction of information technology driven design techniques, constantly updating building information modeling protocols, new policy demands coupled together with environmental regulations and cultural fluctuations are all open-ended dynamic phenomena within which contemporary...

Mechanisms for Self-organizing Ad Hoc Grids

Resources contributed in ad hoc grids are volatile, unreliable and non-dedicated. Furthermore, resource owners contribute resources according to their own use and access policies. This phenomenon necessitates the study of the mechanisms that enable the ad hoc grid to modify its infrastructure in an autonomous way according to varying resource...

Thermodynamic explorations into sustainable energy conversion: Learning from living systems

Personal networks: An architecture for self-organized personal wireless communications

Understanding open source communities: An organizational perspective

Open source communities are groups of sometimes hundreds if not thousands of individuals with different interests, backgrounds and motives. Many participants are volunteers, who are not paid to take part in the communities. Furthermore, many never get to meet each other in real life. They meet virtually, on the Internet. Yet they are able to...

MEDUSA: Survivable information security in critical infrastructures