ON SELF-ORGANIZATION THEORY AND URBAN GEOGRAPHY DEVELOPMENT
介绍自组织理论，认为城市系统是开放系统，其发展是非可逆过程，若能形成耗散结构则趋向进化，否则退化。城市地理学应运用自组织理论研究城市中的自组织现象，以推动生态城市、数字城市等可持续发展领域。
Self-organization theory belongs to system sciences, which is a new kind of theory to describe nonreversible process. According to the self-organization theory, an opening system will change into dissipative structural system if it is in nonlinear far away from balance, and if it can get enough negative entropy from outside to counteract positive entropy in it. Urban system is one kind of opening system, and the urban development is one of nonreversible processes in the universe. The development of urban system tends to anagenesis if it can go into dissipative structural system, otherwise, it comes into catagenesis. Urban geography should use the research methods of self-organization theory to study the self-organization phenomena in urban systems. By using the self-organization theory, urban geography would make great progress in the field of urban sustainable development such as ecocity, digital cities, urban population, urban scale, etc..