If we created City Day to celebrate our cities, this celebration would bring a focus to the value of the city to the majority of humans world-wide. It has the possibility of connecting silos, stovepipes and solitudes within the city.
Regular city celebration would create a pattern of aligning diverse individual intentions to a celebratory purpose, bonding different cultures to a super-ordinate goal and negotiating resources across multiple interests. City celebrations could create a healthy competitive spirit between cities, encouraging cities to learn from each other (something the natural world encourages as intergroup tournaments within species – like the survival of the most resilient beehives who pollinate a single field).
City celebration is an act of appreciation. Like the methodology of appreciative inquiry it will open up a process of discovering who and what the city can celebrate, dreaming what is possible, designing the celebration and implementing the design. Such an act of multi-stakeholder engagement will point the city system into an appreciative direction which will raise the levels of awareness about the assets, benefits and capitals in the city.
Such a City Celebration may be the next step for humans to becoming city centric. The act of co-creating cultural consciousness will encourage city-zens to own the city through witnessing its value. Such action will not only take back city heritage but may allow City-Zens to claim it for the first time.
This city scale of appreciation could then act as a springboard for larger scales of appreciation at the eco-region and global levels. Perhaps, city celebration can act as a super-ordinate goal that will engender coherence at a scale most people can relate to. And in so doing we may mature the capacity of the human species into more vibrant effectiveness as Gaia’s Reflective Organ?
Just reflecting.
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