When we first visited Durant in 2013 we asked for a tour of the city. That gave us a feel for the outer space of the city – its geography, built city and economy.
But more importantly we organized with our Tour Guide 4 ways to get to know the inner space of the city using these tools:
- Meeting the 4 Voices of the City
- Asking 4 Questions that Release Potential in a City
- Guidelines for Dialogue
- 12 Intelligences Observations
The 4 Voices are a way to bring the whole city system into the room. I asked to meet 3 representatives from these Voices: Citizens, Civil Society, Civic Managers and Business.
In order to start our dialogue, we shared the Guidelines for a Generative Dialogue so that everyone’s voice could be heard. And with this process, we planted the seed for a succession of 9 dialogues to follow.
We gathered in a dialogue circle in the Library. In less than 2 hours I asked 4 key questions and learned for Durant:
- What works around here?
- What doesn’t work around here?
- If you were Mayor for a day and could change anything, what would you change?
- How would you describe your community and yourself?
Finally, after engaging with the streets and the people of Durant, I used a assessment that summarized the key observations that I had made of Durant in terms of the 12 Integral City Intelligences:
- Contexting Intelligences: Ecosphere, Emerging, Integral, Living
- Individual Intelligences: Inner, Outer
- Collective Intelligences: Social (Structural-Systems), Cultural (Storytelling)
- Strategic Intelligences: Inquiry, Meshworking, Navigating
- Evolving Intelligences: (the energetic impulse that drives all the other intelligences)
What did Integral City discover about Durant when this “due diligence” was completed? We discovered that we were attracted to one another, and naturally moved from a stage of courtship to “marriage” with the drafting of a Proposal.
That Proposal set out the process by which Integral City would bring its frameworks to build on Durant’s natural expression of Placecaring by engaging all 4 Voices to create a unified Vision for the city and to build Placemaking capacities by developing the strategies to implement it.
This blog series celebrates the launch of Book 2 in the Integral City Book Series: Integral City Inquiry & Action: Designing Impact for the Human Hive.
In this blog series, we share a case study that we presented at Tamarack’s Collective Impact 3.0 conference to tell you how Imagine Durant has used the Integral City Placecaring & Placemaking tools for the Human Hive.
The series includes:
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