Integral Intelligence arises because the city, is a whole system, with multiple simultaneous realities that reflect – how people act, how people think, how people relate and how people create/produce. Integral Intelligences can be mapped into the four quadrants explored by the AQAL model developed by Ken Wilber.

The four quadrants are a beautiful fractal pattern of how the realities of the city emerge through individual actions (Upper Right), individual intentions and beliefs (Upper Left), collective cultures and relationships (Lower Left) and Social Systems and Institutions (Lower Right).

The four quadrants also situate the voices of the city: the City Manager’s Operational Direction (UR); The Citizen’s views of Quality of Life (UL); Civil Society’s Care and Compassion (LL); and the City Developer’s Innovations and Systems (LR).

So Integral Intelligences sweep into our conversations the whole system of the city’s discourses, engagements, interactions and productive capacity. When looking at a city through the Integral Lenses all of a sudden we can see why we have to embrace the qualities of Place Caring (the left hand quadrants) with the qualities of Place Making (the right hand quadrants). By embracing the realities and voices from all the quadrants, we embrace a city’s wholeness as a dynamic, adaptive  living system responding to internal and external life conditions.

An Integral City acts much like a complex adaptive human system that concentrates habitat for humans like a bee hive does for bees. 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. The four quadrants help us to see how beautifully that occurs through the interactions of individuals and collectives and with both qualitative and quantitative capacities.

As Ken Wilber points out the Integral Model allows us to see that every one of us brings a true but partial view of life to life’s table. When we combine all the partial views into the meta-view of the Integral City, a vitality and wholeness emerges as the city’s spirit!!

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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.