Emergent Intelligence helps us not only see the city as  a whole but to design it as a whole. This gives us a chance to tap into our human hive mind – a mind that transcends and includes our individual minds. This condition arises because each person is massively interdependent on a living collective system in which he or she is embedded.

Where am I seeing evidence that this is emerging in cities? New discoveries like human generated energy  and new building designs that are energy neutral or even energy generating such as we see in Cradle to Cradle certification or where we are changing how we even think about designing energy effective buildings.

Such developments are signficant because, as a dissipative structure the city sucks in resources from its environment and spews out products, by-products and waste to its environment. That is why, when we take into consideration all the cities of the world (where now more than 50% of humanity live), their functioning affects the lives of all people regardless of where they live, inside or outside the city.

If city designers and developers can see the city as if it were a whole system, they may be able to appreciate its embedded wisdom for surviving in its unique life conditions; the mystery of its collective life force; and the tremendous potential it embraces in the energy, information and matter that it embraces. Seeing the city as a whole helps us to truly appreciate the performance of its sub-systems and gives us the context in which we can understand and flow with emergence.

Now What?  Here are three simple rules (principles) for applying Integral City Emergent Intelligences:

1. Survive so all living systems (holons) serve each other’s existence.

2. Adapt all city functions to flow in a closed loop of resource exchange with the environment.

3. Create a self-regenerating feedback loop, by interconnecting human regeneration cycles so that they honour the contributions of each stage of life as they replenish the environment.

===

This blog is a prologue to the Integral City webinar conference  City 2.0 Co-Creating the Future of the Human Hive . We are inventing a new operating system for the city.  Click to get more details re the Free Expo and eLaboratory membership  scheduled September 4-27  2012. You are invited to attend and participate.