From cities and economies to brains and ecosystems, many complex systems share striking regularities: similar patterns repeat across scales, and sudden transitions can emerge from seemingly stable dynamics. This workshop brings together leading researchers to explore how ideas such as scaling laws, criticality, and self-organization help us understand collective behavior in systems composed of many interacting parts. By crossing traditional boundaries between physics, biology, economics, and urban science, the meeting aims to uncover unifying principles that govern complexity in the natural and social world.

A central theme of the workshop is the tension between robustness and fragility in complex systems: how large-scale regularities coexist with fluctuations, instabilities, and critical transitions. Concepts such as allometric scaling, universality, and self-organized criticality offer powerful lenses to connect phenomena as diverse as metabolic rates, neural activity, epidemic spreading, financial markets, and urban growth. The invited speakers have played a key role in shaping these frameworks, both theoretically and through data-driven approaches.

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Relevance and timeliness

Understanding scaling and criticality has become particularly urgent in the context of rapid urbanization, climate change, global pandemics, and increasing socio-economic interconnectedness. Cities are growing faster than ever, financial and ecological systems are tightly coupled, and societies are repeatedly confronted with cascading failures and abrupt transitions. At the same time, unprecedented volumes of data now allow for systematic empirical tests of theories that were once purely conceptual. This workshop leverages these developments to ask whether general principles of complex systems can inform prediction, resilience, and policy, making it especially timely for researchers working at the interface of theory, data, and real-world applications.​