The Integral City 2.0 Online Conference gathered 60 visionary thought leaders, designers and practitioners, with 600 participants from 6 continents, to inquire into how to design a new operating system for the city. The 12-day Conference allowed exploration of each of the 12 intelligences from the book, Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive, and their contributions to city vitality.

IntegralCity collective City 2.0

The Conference was designed to be co-generative and appreciative, with an action research focus, collecting data through guided interviews aligned with each of the 12 intelligences. Over 70 hours of recorded interviews and dialogue were generated (audio podcasts and webinars), and subsequently transcribed into over 500 pages of transcripts. 660 thought leaders, designers, practitioners and participants gathered synchronously and asynchronously in a spirit of radical optimism, an essential evolutionary aspect of life.

The four voices of the Integral City – city-zens (UL) , civil society (LL), government/agency (UR), and business/organization (LR) – confirmed that a new operating system for the city is needed because cities face global crises related to water, food, energy, finance and climate change. The four Integral City voices say that this operating system resides within each of us and between us. Moreover, the new operating system is epitomized by, and optimized with, the Master Code: take care of self, take care of others, take care of this place/planet.

In exploring the Master Code, we found that principles of living systems resonate with the intelligences and principles of Integral City. This was independently confirmed by 5 visionaries using different lenses of human systems: groups, cities, sustainable design, investment and organizations. Our data shows that our ecological transactions, cultural translations, structural transformations and planetary evolution are emerging the early stages of a collective consciousness. The city is co-creating us and we are co-creating it. The city is alive.

The new operating system for cities embraces a transdisciplinary design with strategies that embrace all four Integral quadrants: UL Intentional, LL Cultural, UR Behavioral, and LR Structural. It embraces a desire to act as a planet of cities embedding living system, resilience and life cycle strategies. The Integral intelligence of the new operating system allows cities to be Gaia’s reflective organs, with human city-zens as the cells in that organ, their wellbeing dependent on their relationships with each other and the planet. The logic processors of the new operating system connect the dots by aligning purpose, priorities, people and planet with the natural flow of information, energy and matter. Finally the power source for the new operating system is an evolutionary manifestation of the Master Code, with care and compassion as core, renewing energy.

It is not enough to ask what can the city do for us? It is time to ask what can we do for the city? City-centric individuals and organizations with vested city interests (governments/agencies, business, civil society) must play catalytic roles – to co-generate inquiry, innovate learning and strengthen city relationships as the true currency for evolving city capacity and spirit.

This is our Executive Summary of the Radically Optimistic Inquiry into Operating System 2.0. The full proceedings will be released in January 2013. Drop us a line if you want to be on our notice list. Subject: Proceedings  integralcity@gmail.com

… the city sends signals to itself
for speed, agility, vitality
using any channel
to connect
civilization to nature
making sense together
using all means
to manifest
connectivity …

Meshworks Manifest, B. Sanders