  The conceptual background for a detailed study of the urban form of the city
of Bologna is discussed with a view to modern methodological insight as it is
being presented by recent results of complexity theory and the theory of
self-organized criticality. The basic idea is to visualize the city of Bologna
as an example of a massively parallely organized and interacting complex
computational system in the sense of these recent theories. It is proposed to
relate aspects of urban evolution to a universal concept of evolution which is
governing all processes in nature. The universality of this approach is thought
of as being an epistemological advantage as compared to more classical studies
utilizing primarily local and specific methods for their modelling procedures.
To actually establish whether this is in fact an advantage or not will be one
of the main results of this present series of papers. In this very first part
of the study, the basic idea is explicated in some detail, and the fundamental
concepts are introduced in order to clarify the terminology utilized in the
following. Two more parts of this study will follow in due time.
