4/22 – Jeannie Carlisle with Marilyn Hamilton: Integral City, Inquiry & Action

April-June 2017 / Integral Publishers’ Bookshelf

JC: Hello Marilyn, and welcome! In a few sentences, please describe the premise of this important new book for our readers.

MH: Integral City Inquiry & Action: Designing Impact for the Human Hive is a guidebook for placecaring and placemaking. It offers urban planners the complementary steps to the technology offered by Smart Cities and the necessary consciousness and culture related to the science of Resilient Cities. We provide 16 templates for Action Research practices that engage the 4 Voices of the city – Citizens, Civic Managers, Civil Society and Business – so they can discover Purpose, develop Visions and design the Strategies to implement both placecaring and placemaking.

JC: What inspired you to write this book?

MH: Integral City Inquiry & Action: Designing Impact for the Human Hive is Book 2 in the series of Integral City Books. Book 1, Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive introduced the 12 Intelligences that human beings at the city scale need to demonstrate as evolutionary, complex, integral systems. Readers of Book 1 asked for the manual that would help them wake up these intelligences. Since we believe in the evolutionary impulse, we felt we should test out and share the bottom-up change processes of Action Research/Learning. So, Book 2 evolved as we responded to small cities like Durant Oklahoma or whole countries like Russia’s Living Cities initiative to change 1000 cities. At the Integral Theory Conference 2015, I could see how the processes, programs and practices all fit together within an integral methodological framework (to borrow Wilber’s description) so I set out to translate that into an accessible and practical book.

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