Sense in the City News Update November 2010

November Greetings, Integral City-zens and Friends of Integral City  

Today’s Integral City Sparkie for the City Brain :

… a tension in favor of the values and behavior that are most coherent with the current life conditions will tend to be maintained. The flip side of this behavior is that the dominant culture will protect itself against diversity generation. When life conditions finally require the solutions that diversity generation can offer, the problems created by the conformity enforcer values will usually have become so acute that the majority are willing to change. It appears that these natural evolutionary cycles are fractal and emerge at all levels of scale …

Hamilton, M., 2008, Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive, p.187

What a difference a month makes. From October’s jubilant Chilean miners’ rescue to November’s desperate Irish economic rescue. We must ponder, how do we know if an eruption of the underworld brings nutrients to the surface or merely toxic discharge? Is it the season of Advent, regrouping, full body scans, pat downs, WikiLeaks, shadows, surrender, pollination, dormancy, climate change or long economic emergencies? We live in a world where tensions, seasons, cultures and expectations are so jumbled we need an integral map to sort out mind, brain, heart and body – so that we can notice the pattern language of the evolutionary impulse as it emerges more resilient meshes.

So amongst the seeming disruptions, this month’s newsletter notices signs of hope from Ireland (yes!), Sweden, and Canada.

1. This month I spent a week in Ireland. While the media reported on the jaded negotiations of the EU and IMF with the Dail, Integral City was contributing to Globe Forum Dublin, witnessing 200 of Ireland’s best researchers and innovators demonstrate Ireland’s real recovery plan in their innovation, ideas and intellect. Listen to our interview with Globe Forum Founder Johan Gorecki and see the Innovating Ireland that Globe Forum catalyzed in November. 
2. Also check out here Globe Forum Dublin’s Highlight coverage.    
3. Integral City spoke on Cities as Innovation Ecosystems. Click here for the summary and a great video of our evolutionary teachers, the honey bee.
4. Nominate your City for Globe Forum, Sustainable City Awards 2010 (deadline in Feb. 4, 2011). This award focuses on a holistic approach to Sustainability  in cities and integrates different types of capital for a better future in cities around the world. If your city can demonstrate one or more special initiatives that it has undertaken in the last two years in one or more of the various types of capital (environmental, intellectual, social, financial, technical, cultural, political) to reach a more sustainable future, then Click here to find the details and invitation links .  
5. Review the new Research by three Graduates of the Master’s of Strategic Leadership Towards Sustainability Program (Bleckinge Institute of Technology, Karlskrona, Sweden). Juan Carlos Kaiten, Kara Stonehouse and Sonja Niederhumer describe their work in  The Magic Canoe – Large Scale Collaboration Towards Sustainable Development. Click here to download a summary and full thesis.   In resonance with the PhD Researchers and Innovators in Dublin the authors say this about their Findings:

The magic canoe is a story about a collaboration process that magically expands in size to include any participants wanting to help in the effort towards achieving a common goal.

In order to ensure the actions taken in the complex system are not accidentally counterproductive, a strategic approach to sustainable development can be undertaken.

The concept of backcasting from basic sustainability principles using systems thinking is the core of strategic sustainable development, and can be can be applied to the collaborative body….

This research attempts to further the body of knowledge for collaboration in complex social systems, as well as link it directly to Strategic Sustainable Development.