An Integral City Adds Value to the Earth

© Marilyn Hamilton PhD CGA

Adapted from Integral City: Whole Systems Living for Whole City Life (Hamilton, 2007, forthcoming book). The book describes the city as a whole system like the human equivalent of the beehive. It proposes an integral meta-framework to reframe cities as resilient, vibrant human habitats. Exploring the intentions, behaviours, cultures and social systems of individuals and groups in the city, in the context of climatic/geographic life conditions, it integrates the sciences of living systems, complexity, human development and energy, to optimize the emergence and sustainability of human capacities in the city.

 

What is a city?

A city is a human system that emerges from the interaction of individuals and groups to produce both a habitat (or a built city) and a conscious presence (or spirit). Depending on which authority you name, the size of a city can be 50,000 people (like the Romans built) or 20,000,000 people (like the Japanese, Chinese and Mexicans have already built).

An integral city is a way of looking at the city, regardless of its size to see it as a whole system – a living system within the context of a specific natural environment (such as mountain, sea or prairie), climate and natural ecology. As such an integral city is dynamic, adaptive and responsive to its external life conditions and internal life conditions. An integral city is a complex adaptive human system that concentrates habitat for humans like a beehive does for bees or an anthill does for ants. As a natural system it faces all the same issues, factors and challenges that affect the concentration of life anywhere: sustaining flows of information, matter and energy for the survival of human life. (Miller, 1978)

What are the qualities that create the optimal conditions for human habitats?

Integral is one word that coalesces all the qualities of the optimal conditions for human habitats.

Integral means whole, comprehensive, integrated, interconnected, inclusive, all encompassing, vibrant, responsive, adaptive. Integral does not mean fragmented, partial, exclusive, frozen, unchanging. Integral reflects the conditions of life from which we spring: complex, adaptive, evolving, developmental. Integral is big enough to include all of existence: the good, the bad and the ugly; the conscious and unconscious; the positive and the negative; the yin and the yang; the virtues and the vices; body, mind, heart and soul; you and me, us and them.

Integral is a word that describes the patterns of existence that emerge from the systemic nature of the universe – that everything is connected to everything else; that life on earth is massively connected from the microscopic level to the telescopic level. In fact every “thing” is in fact not just a thing but a “system” that is in integral relationship to other systems. The whole universe is a system of systems of systems, ad infinitum.

The patterns of existence that have evolved over the last 14 billion years, since the Universe began with the Big Bang, have produced human systems with a distinct form of consciousness in the last 100,000 years. Within the complex life conditions that produced the universe, our galaxy, our solar system and our planet, each human carries within them significant evidence of the complex evolutionary patterns of living systems – we are made of the water and “dust of the physical” earth and our 3 layered brain shows our heritage from reptile to animal to languaging primate.

Just as our bodies have evolved, so have our social complexities.  Regardless of where we have been located on earth, our diverse human cultures demonstrate evidence that when life conditions provoked us to change (the proverbial situation that Einstein described as needing a new way of life (aka mind) to solve the problems that our old ways of life could not) we have changed, generally in the direction of greater complexity. We have moved from the hearth based circle of family survival, through the bonding systems of clan and tribe, to the power struggles of chief and king, to the ordering authorities of state and place of worship, to the strategic economies of material exchange, to the accepting embrace of diverse peoples, to the flex and flow of global systems, to a Gaia honoring of all life.  With each of these levels of historical complexity we have created new artifacts, habitats, structures and forms to contain our human systems. We call the most concentrated and complex of these containers, cities.

The life conditions that stimulated our bodies and brains to adapt and survive were accompanied by an evolving consciousness that enabled the evolution of what it means to be human. And it is precisely those life conditions that contribute to the evolution and the state of well being of our cities today.

Like our physical bodies and habitat structures, our individual human life cycles bear witness to the developmental nature of the human system.  The patterns of life that show up in our bodies and that we extend into the structures of our cities show up in every individual life. We are born helpless and dependent on our parents, who are dependent on the system of friends, work, health, school and community, who are dependent on the social systems of city, state and nation, who are dependent on the cultural norms, who are dependent on the relationships with friendly and hostile cultures and states, who are dependent on the natural ecology of their geography, which is integrated with the global system of climate and energy flow. (Diamond, 2005; Barnett, 2005)

Thus, who we are in the Integral City depends on who and how we are able to grow the potential of the human condition in each of us. And it is the matching of that human potential to the structures of the built environment of the city, and the social and cultural institutions that creates the coherence we call “optimal life conditions”.(Graves, 2003  )

This means that, like an individual human life, a city goes through stages of development that could be identified as infant, child, youth, adult, parent, grandparent, elder. Each stage will translate into a different expression of the city, even though it will remain the same place. This is the essence of “place making” – it is kind of like creating the spirit or soul of the city as it ages (Wight, 2002).

At the same time the city’s inhabitants are continuously cycling through their life stages, as are the institutions and organizations, making the integral city a highly dynamic system. In fact the optimal life conditions for an integral city depends more on the resilience of its citizens – or their capacity to adapt in the face of change – than the stability any of the city’s features.

 How do you sustain an integral city? 

Since the Brundtland Report (Brundtland, 1987) was published in 1987, the world has aspired to balance the interconnection amongst the three rings of the environment, the economic and the social. This framing of existence recognized the importance of the three factors, while considering them all equal.

However, all the sciences now tell us that although these factors are massively interconnected, two of the factors are utterly dependent on the third: the economy and the social factors are encompassed by, rest on and are over-ridden by the environment.

The evidence for the truth of this relationship lies in the lost civilizations of Earth – the Mayan, Easter Island, Ashkenaze – where the grizzly truths of how the intensity of human systems (aka cities) overwhelmed the carrying capacity of the supporting environment (Diamond, 2005; Wright, 2004).

When faced with this evidence, what are the lessons we need to learn for the survival of our own cities? How could these very sophisticated cities fail so close to the peak of their apparently optimal existence? One of the most comprehensive scientific studies of Living Systems, was undertaken under the leadership of James Grier Miller in the 1960’s and 1970’s (Miller, 1978). This interdisciplinary team concluded that every living system has 3 major processing systems: one for matter, one for energy, and one for information. Moreover, to process these three constituents every living system had developed some variation of 19 sub-systems.

It appears that the lessons from history teach us that to some degree, human cities have mastered the flow of matter and energy; however, it appears that our lost cities of the past lost touch with the information that could alert them to the pending doom of their demise.

 Are we losing touch with our cities in-formation?

The cities we manage are operating in both external information silos and internal information stovepipes (Dale, 2001). We make some decisions that inter-relate the cities with each other within one bio-region in some parts of the world. But what is more surprising? (even shocking?) is that we seem to make even fewer decisions within any given city with reference to the key sub-systems that support the human condition.  We have separate bureaucracies for our city management, health care systems, schooling (at all levels) and workplaces.

Is it any wonder that we cannot see the city as a single wholly integrated system that depends on the interconnection amongst these sub-systems to serve the well being of its inhabitants?

Ironically, within each of these sub-systems (city management, health care systems, schooling  and workplaces) we are developing progressively more complex information systems to tell us everything we need to know about bricks and mortar; epidemiology; grading systems; and performance management. But, we are not seeing the integral nature of each of these sub-systems nor the integral connections between them. For the most part we are generating and measuring quantitative, objective information to give us reports on the material outcomes of these sub-systems. Be we generally forget that the prime importance of these sub-systems is to support the nature of being fully human. To be fully human engages not only material measure of matter and energy, but also engages the information aspect of our existence -- our consciousness and our relationships with one another.

In fact, in order to understand the living system nature of cities (and thereby their holographic and fractal nature) we must consider four essential maps of city life:

·         the four quadrant map of reality

·         the nested holarchy of city systems

·         the complex adaptive dynamic states of change

·         the scalar fractal relationship of micro, meso and macro human systems

Each of these maps gives us a different view of the city – thus each is a partial view of the city.. But each of the maps helps us to understand the interrelationship of matter, energy and information with an importantly unique perspective. And because each of the maps is a partial view of the same city system they can be superimposed on each other to give us an more comprehensive, complete picture of the whole system of systems. Let’s look at each one in turn.

 Map 1: The four quadrant map of reality

The integral map (Beck et al 1996; Graves, 2003; Wilber, 1996) is a four quadrant map that gives us a view of the city that reveals it has both an outer and an inner life; and an individual and collective expression. The intersection of these two polarities reveals four quadrants that we can label as:

·         UL individual interior/ internal/subjective/intangible

·         LL collective interior/internal/intersubjective/intangible

·         UR individual exterior/ external/objective/tangible

·         LR collective exterior/ external/objective/tangible

Examples of the integral model in action come from WHO’s definition of a Healthy Community; BC’s framework for Healthy Communities.

The Four Quadrant Map is a map of city perspectives. Each quadrant represents the view from the different lenses of I, We, It and Its/Them. Each of the four perspectives represents a cluster of domains of knowledge, from which a city-universe of knowledge has emerged. The Upper Left Quadrant holds the knowledge bases of the Aesthetics and Fine Arts. The Lower Left holds the knowledge bases of the Humanities. The Upper Right holds the knowledge bases of the Life Sciences. The Lower Right holds the knowledge bases of the Hard Sciences. Thus have our institutions of higher learning organized the content knowledge of the universe: Beauty, Goodness and Truth.

But more than the content of our reality, the Four Quadrant map discloses the particular points of view of key city dwellers.

The Subjective I appreciates the Beauty of life – who reveals the aesthetic quality of living systems, often hidden from view in the modern city but more demonstrated and honored in ancient cities, where the scale of the human systems was more resilient with the built city. Another description of the Subjective I is the psychological (psycho) reality of the city.

The Intersubjective We appreciates the Goodness in life – who reveals the moral qualities of life choices that are necessary on every level of human existence and association. These intersubjective perspectives are woven from the stories we tell each other in every informal connection of daily life, right through to the tales and myths we create to pass along our archetypal experiences to the formal laws we create for the smooth operation of civic society. These Goodness perspectives become the crucibles that hold our Subjective Beauty and inform us what is accepted by critical numbers of people in our city experience, as good or bad, beautiful or ugly. Another description of the Intersubjective We is the cultural reality of the city.

The Objective It appreciates the Truth of life – who demonstrates the actions of life that support material survival in the city. The Objective It is the arbiter of material energy of the city, that rests on the basics of material life: water, food, waste flow, shelter, clothing. From the Objective It we calculate our individual ecological footprints (Rees, 1994). And without attention to the Objective It’s wellbeing, the quality of the built life in the city fails utterly. Another description of the Objective It is the biological (bio) reality of the city.

The Interobjective Its conveys the Truth that emerges from the material systems that support the Objective Its individual existences – but by combining multiple material needs, efficient systems can be developed that deliver water and food,  dispose of waste, build and maintain shelter and produce clothing. From the intelligence of the Interobjective Its domains, the artifact of the built city emerges, thus creating a combined footprint with geological coordinates and an extended footprint that represents the energy consumed for a large number of people to sustain themselves in one city location. Another description of the Interobjective Its  is the social reality of the city.

Thus the Four Quadrant map of the city reveals: partial but usefully various knowledge maps and real differing perspectives that reflect different ways of knowing. On top of that, this map shows both the inextricable linkages of one quadrant to all others and all quadrants to any one or combination of one. In so doing, it also reveals the inadequacy of the pursuit of knowledge through any combination of quadrants that is less than the four altogether. Thus the Four Quadrant map shows us clearly the dilemma city dwellers have faced since the major rise of the city in the last three to four hundred years – a historical period when the West agreed to split the study of knowledge into right and left quadrants – between the sciences and the church/spiritual practices – and thus, dichotomizing our understanding of human systems of all kinds, including the city. This split underlies the siloing of domains of human knowledge and the failure to grasp the interconnections of all knowledge content and ways of knowing. It is the root of looking at the city as less than a whole human system – but merely as a collection of parts – or de-part-ments.

 Map 2: The nested holarchy of city systems

The city as a human system is a nest of systems. In other words, one cannot just look at the city as a whole or integral system, without recognizing that the whole is made up of a series of whole systems. Gradually in the last hundred years, as science has come to realize that its ways of seeing reality have much in common with certain deep spiritual perspectives. Both domains have reframed their worldviews from one described as being the sum of many parts, to one recognized as being entirely wholistic or holistic. Different authors and knowledge centres have gained lenses for recognizing that the universe is made up of systems of systems of systems – each one of them a wholeness in itself. Some talk of centres (Alexander, 2004), others talk of holons (Koestler) and others of holarchies (Wilber, 1996). But regardless of terminology what each observer sees is that human systems, as a sub-set of natural, living systems are also whole systems made up of sub-systems.

As discernment about whole systems has matured, so too has the recognition that the systems have orders of complexity, so that the holons, wholes and centres are nested into holarchies (Wilber, 1996) or panarchies (Holling, 2001), where it is possible to see the levels of complexity emerge over time. In cities we can see this in the archeological maps that show us in cross-section the built city becoming more and more complex as human systems developed to meet greater and differing challenges. In successful cities these maps reveal that the solutions for the basic functions of cities and how they have transcended and included the solutions that have gone before. In unsuccessful cities the systems of wholes has been subverted by the failure to see or understand that each whole must be congruent with the other whole systems it interacts with (Alexander, 2004).  Alexander (p. 110) notices that successful architecture and living systems have a series of strong centres that interconnect and support one another – not necessarily the same size centres but complementary ones that serve each others’ existence in the overall wholeness of life.

Map 3: The complex adaptive dynamic states of change

This third map conveys the type of and rate of change in the city. As a living system, the human system in the city is constantly in the flux of adapting to its life conditions. These life conditions arise from its external situation in a climactic-geological location. They also arise from the internal situation where the city adapts to the processing of matter, energy and information related to its bio-psycho-cultural-social needs. In fact both external and internal adaptiveness must occur simultaneously.

This view of the city can also be seen in the archeological cross-section but within the context of its geo-bio-region across time that demonstrates how coherent was the city in relation to the sources of its matter and energy. The dynamics of change are best pictured as the vectors that expand the four quadrants or the whole city as it adapts to the provocations of sources of supply. The dynamics of the city’s change state reflect its resilience under duress: how well does it survive in turbulent, chaotic, breakthrough, and stable conditions. Historical examples provide apocryphal tales of the health of city life: the submergence of Atlantis, the burial of  Pompey, the misery of London during the Plague, the demolition of Dresden. As our world shrinks, modern examples abound with graphic detail reported on CNN just like the weather conditions such change mimics: the drought of African Saharan cities; the drowning of New Orleans; the bombing of Lebanon.

Jane Jacobs (Jacobs, 1970) suggested that city health is highly economy dependent – that cities have control over the means of their wellbeing by allocating energies to supply their resources from within. But unless they remain globally aware of their need for adaptive change they may be blindsided by false economies (like failure to re-build New Orleans’ levies) or mindsets insufficient to surviving their change conditions ( eg. supporting guerrilla worldviews within Lebanon’s governance systems).

Map 4: The scalar fractal relationship of micro, meso and macro human systems

The last map of the city that casts light on its wholeness, is one arising from the insights of non-linear mathematics. Fractal geometry reveals the algorithms of natural systems – the beautiful repeated patterns that result from the application of simple rules of relationship and association that apply at multiple levels of scale. These are the rules of human systems that reveal that the health of the city is deeply embedded in the rules that contribute to the health of the individual, families, the team, the organization, the neighborhood, city hall, nation and the world. If we fail to make congruent these scales of human systems, then the city as a whole experiences a rent in the fabric of its whole system.

An example that challenges every city on the globe today is homelessness. Human systems attempt to address this malady as if it were a part that could be excised from the system of the whole, instead of examining why the world suffers from starvation, dehydration, lack of shelter and lack of clothing. Cities are meso entities in a web of human systems comprised of micro-entities (individuals, families, groups, organizations) and macro entities (nations, global alliances), amidst a growing mass of competing meso entity cities. The nodal nature of cities, where so much of the human system is knotted together in tight messes of energy, makes them natural candidates for taking on the solution to these problems. But the fractal quality of human systems belies the fact that the dysfunctional patterns must be tackled at all three levels at once. Such is the nature of wholeness – that the pasture will not be green until all (or most) of the blades of grass in the meadow are green. And one pasture will never be green until all (or most) other pastures are green so that those who depend on pasture health will not invade the greenness of other pastures, when the health of their pasture deteriorates or disappears.

 Going Beyond the Attainment of Quality of Life to the City of the Future

Popular wisdom urges us to examine human behaviour so that the quality of human life can be improved. We focus on overpopulation, pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, as evidence of the mess and stress that humans have contributed to life on earth. It is obvious that our behaviours affect not only our own species but virtually every other species with whom we share this planet. However, threatening these undeniable conditions, they are the very signals that indicate our next awakening.

The dangers to the quality of life can all be attributed to the emergence of the city. Without the rise of the city, we could never have created such supportive life conditions that the results can be measured in expanded species growth (overpopulation), undisciplined use of resources (pollution) or climate change (CO2 overproduction).

So, simply to attempt to reclaim some illusive quality of life that a relatively privileged portion of the human species has enjoyed for the last 150 years and/or to raise the quality of life of the rest of the earth’s people, is to miss the opportunity for more intelligent human life on earth.

The integral city would make use of the centres of intelligence that exist within its city limits and create conditions of living that are both irresistible and sustainable, because the very act of living this way is self-organizing, self-reinforcing and self-sustaining. That a city could be not only a centre of excellence but a centre of intelligence and possibility requires an entirely new worldview – one that draws on the insights revealed by our four maps. Such an integral city of the future would respect (by transcending and including) its climatic-geo-bio life conditions, but not be limited by them. It is the very quality of human intelligence – the noetic consciousness that makes possible even the idea of an Integral City – a node of such brilliance and possibility that it could attract all the resources necessary to adapt and emerge into ever complexifying and life giving habitats for humanity.

 Adding to the Value of the Bio-Region

An integral city would go beyond the sustenance of the human systems which it contains and actually add value to the bio-region in which it is located. Such a city’s health would be measured in the context of the bio-region’s health. When we consider that the earth has many fewer bio-regions than it has cities, we can start to see that by expanding the boundaries of a healthy city into the region, we essentially demand that the city be governed by the conditions of its life-giving resources.

If we did this with any commitment to intelligent governance, care for natural resources, and application of the best of human ways of knowing, the city would move from the immature, undisciplined, unmanaged, unmanageable knot of life that is our current experience into a node of free-flowing energy, matter and information. When we arrive at this stage, cities will be recognized for the value that they add to the earth. If we don’t arrive at this stage, cities will putrefy in their own wastes, posing dangers to the rest of the world of spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical dis-ease, that can be exported by air, land and sea.

 An Integral City Adds Value to the Earth

These qualities of an integral city challenge us to go beyond a narrow improvement of quality of life. They help us to see that the phenomenon of the city actually adds value to the Earth, because the city focuses and condenses human energy into nodes of intelligence. The integral city has the potential to create a quantum leap in human capacities by harnessing the energy created in the intelligence field of human systems in the city. The four maps show us how to see the wholeness in the city. They help us to understand that it cannot be sub-divided into parts. Any parts we label as such are simply elements of an indivisible wholeness that supports the indivisible wholeness of life.

But the models give us insight into the vibrancy of wholeness and help us to detect when that wholeness is not optimized.  They help us understand how the city as a whole functions internally, while seeing the commonalities in the patterns of human systems that link them externally to other cities facing the same affronts to their integralness.

 References

Alexander, C. (2004). The Phenomenon of Life (September 1, 2004 ed. Vol. 1). Berkeley, CA: Center for Environmental Structure.

Barnett, T. P. M. (2005). The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century (trade paperback ed.). New York: The Berkley Publishing Group.

Beck, D. (2002). Spiral Dynamics in the Integral Age. Paper presented at the Spiral Dynamics integral, Level 1.

Brundtland, H. (1987). Our Common Future. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Dale, A. (2001). At The Edge: Sustainable Development in the 21st Century. Vancouver: UBC Press.

Diamond, J. (2005). Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed (first ed.). New York: Penguin Group.

Graves, C. (2003). Levels of Human Existence. Santa Barbara: Eclet Publishing.

Holling, C. S. (2001). Understanding the Complexity of Economic, Ecological, and Social Systems Ecosystems, Vol. 4, pp. 390-405.

Jacobs, J. (1970). Economy of Cities. New York: Vintage Books Edition.

Miller, J. G. (1978). Living Systems. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company.

Rees, W. E. P. D., & Wackernagel, M. (1994). Ecological Footprints and Appropriated Carrying Capacity:  Measuring the Natural Capital Requirements of the Human Economy, . Washington, DC,: Island Press,.

Wight, I. (2002). Place, Place Making and Planning. Paper presented at the ACSP.

Wilber, K. (1996). Sex, Ecology and Spirituality: the spirit of evolution. Boston: Shambhala Publications Inc.

Wright, R. (2004). A Short History of Progress (Avalon ed.). New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers.

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