This newsletter is published quarterly using a cycle of perspectives on the Integral City viewed from: Planet, People, Place and Power. The theme of this issue is Power.

 

The human hive has millions of stories of spiritual service – in many cities representing all the world’s religions. Once these diverse religious practices were described as spiritual paths, but with today’s richness of cultural plurality, we recognize a spiritual ecology (Patten, 2010).  The city container is a wonderful convergence vessel where spiritual practices differ, conflict, align and/or grow from one another. The Integral City is becoming a vessel where new kinds of spiritual acceptance bridge, integrate and evolve spiritual practise into something that is becoming Integral or even universal.  Patten (2010, p.4) says that, “The new integral evolutionary spirituality both accommodates and resolves the apparent contradictions among the diverse forms of wisdom it integrates. It embraces the paradoxes of theistic and non-theistic spirituality, of 1st-person, 2nd-person, and 3rd-person mysticism.”

Hamilton, M. (2018, in press) Integral City 3.7: Reframing Complex Challenges for Gaia’s Human Hives, Phoenix, AZ: Integral Publishers, p.59

Integral City 4.0 Invites You to Findhorn, Scotland

In the last few months we have stepped up the offer that Integral City is making to Gaia’s wellbeing through sharing the practices and processes of Placecaring and Placemaking. These activities not only mark the release of Book 2 in the Integral City series – on Inquiry, Action & Designing Impact for the Human Hive – but also mark a new stage for Integral City’s global activities.

You are invited to amplify your contributions to Gaia’s wellbeing with Integral City’s growing constellation by joining us at Findhorn Scotland, (arriving 4pm) April 10- 14 (departing morning), 2018. Together, as 4 Voices of the City (Business, Citizens, City Managers, Civil Society) we will explore:  Integral City 4.0: Co-creating the Future of Cities Now.

This workshop will give us the opportunity to go more deeply into the Integral City frameworks, tools, practices and processes that we have shared with these partner organizations in 2017:

·        We have presented twice through the impressive faculties of Tamarack Institute Canada on Collective Impact and the Cities of the Future.

·        We have spent a week with the team of Hub Co-Evolucio in Reus and Tarragona, Catalonia, Co-Creating Cities of the Future Now and had the chance to meet city experts from Finland, UK, Catalonia, Italy +++

·        As I drafted this invitation, I was in Russia for more than a week working with Living Cities Russia witnessing and catalyzing hundreds of cities awakening across this immense nation (marking a new stage of human Evolution 100 years after an earth-changing revolution). In addition, we were invited to speak twice at Skolkovo to more than 50 city teams and 300 Mayors through the Foundation of Monocities (as well as visiting with practitioners of Integral City principles in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Nizhny Novgorod).

It has been exciting and inspiring spending time with Integral City practitioners and others who sense the power of cities to accelerate our collective intelligence not only with individuals and organizations but on behalf of eco-regions, nations and all of Gaia.

So, we hope you will join the Integral City community of practice and others of like mind/heart/body/spirit in Findhorn. You will get the chance to test-drive a new paradigm for the city that the Russians so keenly recognize can make cities fully Alive. You will receive resources to substantiate the theory and science behind Integral City –  plus Action Research designs for practices and processes –  and Navigation Tools for aligning resources, designing dashboards and tracking impact. These will enable you to integrate Integral City resources into your own work and apply them with local intelligence in your own human hives.

This opportunity will mark a new location for Integral City in Findhorn, Scotland – the UK’s oldest eco-village, founded on the principles of Love in Action. It is a special place for discovering the sacred relationship that lies at the heart of the Integral City Master Code: caring for self, others, place and planet. Findhorn hasn’t just talked about this learning journey, but has made a path for all of us, by actually walking it for 55 years. Findhorn holds the impulse of the New Story for the Earth. Come join us to write the New Story for the City – our Human Hives in service to all life on Gaia.

You can get all the information on the workshop from the Findhorn website and apply here: Integral City 4.0. We hope you will register early as this event is by invitation from me and is designed for an intimate circle of 30 international participants.

Meshful blessings for 2018!

Marilyn Hamilton

Meshworkers of the Year Award 2017– Hub CoEvolució Reus, Catalonia, Spain

Hub CoEvolució engaged with the 4+1 Voices of the cities of Reus and Tarragona in Catalonia Spain to co-create an International Congress on Integral Cities.

The purpose of the congress was to develop a new way of understanding cities and their potential for transformation, expanding the capacity for individual and collective action. They clearly made visible the evolutionary potential of cities to co-evolve in Catalonia. The success of the congress marked a pinnacle of 4 years of intensive work by the Hub CoEvolució team. Now they see a new horizon for their purpose to co-create wise futures and the guiding strategies for designing projects in service to growing people and the economy wisely.

Integral City is proud to award Hub CoEvolució the Meshworkers of the Year Award, 2017. Click for full story here.

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Definition of Meshworker

A Meshworker of the Year demonstrates the meshworking intelligence as defined on the website .  Meshworking intelligence creates a “meshwork” by weaving together the best of two operating systems — one that self-organizes, and one that replicates hierarchical structures. The resulting meshwork creates and aligns complex responsive structures and systems that flex and flow.

Candidates for the Meshworkers of the Year Award invest dollars, time, effort and expertise at a level of complexity that serves a whole city or cities. Here are our previous winners:

2016: Gaiasoft, UK

2015: Imagine Durant, USA

2014: Team ARGO, Russia

2013: Populus, Canada

Integral Cities of the Year 2017: 3 Russian City Associations

Monocities. Living Cities. Integrated City: These 3 City Associations of Russia offer an inspiring view of Russia striving to thrive. The experience of meeting directly the 319 Mayors of Monocities; the hundreds of members of Living Cities; and the well represented 4 Voices who created the Integrated City Plan for Nizhny Novgorod – all introduced us to a host of people who genuinely care for their cities and the relationships that can bring them fully to life. We are delighted to announce the trio of Russian City Associations as Integral Cities of the Year 2017.  Click for the full story here.

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“Integral” is not an ideal for a city, but rather a framework for understanding the city as a human system in service to the wellbeing of the planet – for the purposes of evolving the city as the most complex human system yet created on our planet.

Gaia Orion Creates Connection Between Brush for Change and Spirit of Integral City

Integral artist, Gaia Orion is exhibiting now in France. In October 2017 she completed an exhibit of her art at the Brush for Change show at the Integral Center in Boulder Colorado. Gaia revealed how her art depicts many aspects of an integral worldview. You can listen personally to her explain her approach on this video (and thanks for the shout out to Integral City who was proud to sponsor her catalog).

Announcing Integral City Series Book 3 In Press:

Integral City 3.7: Reframing Complex Challenges for Gaia’s Human Hives

We are celebrating the New Year with the delivery to the publishers of the manuscript for Book 3 in the Integral City series.  Here is an excerpt from the Introduction that explains how it relates to Books 1 and 2. Watch for publication release dates later in 2018.

What? So What? Now What? this is the Now What book.
In the first book I proposed What is an Integral City? Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive examined the evidence for a new paradigm of the city that is a living human system, complex in its dynamics and evolutionary in its nature. I considered in each chapter an intelligence that applied to the city, presaging James Lovelock’s conjecture that humans are the reflective organ of the living Earth or Gaia. In Book One I intended to offer a developmental point of view, integrating perspectives that recognize the fractal patterns in human systems that repeat and resonate from the smallest individual scale, up through increasing levels of complexity – families, teams, organizations, sectors, communities and cities.
In the second book I explored So what are the ways we can know, act, relate and create in an Integral City?  Integral City Inquiry and Action: Designing Impact for the Human Hive described the processes that Integral City practitioners have developed to apply the intelligences to developing the quality of life in the city. From a developmental point of view, in Book Two I differentiated two aspects of the whole that makes up the city; namely, the Placecaring left hand quadrants of the Integral model (consciousness and culture) and the Placemaking right hand quadrants (behaviors and systems/infrastructure). In each chapter I described the processes that the Integral City Team has discovered for engaging people through integrally designed inquiry and action to achieve impact that resonated for self, others, place and planet. At the time of writing Book Two I was really struck with the Pope’s encyclical “Laudato Si” (Francis, 2015) especially the chapter on Integral Ecology as it explored how to embrace human systems in a way that values all the developmental expressions of person, place and planet that coexist in the living city.
In this third book I turn to the question Now what do we do as a result of our evidence, inquiry, action and impact? Integral City 3.7 expands my perspective of change in the human system from the individual city to a planet of cities. As I trace out the implications of an Integral City operating system at a higher, more complex level, I attempt to integrate them from a developmental point of view that even moves beyond the planetary view to the Kosmic view.

Celebrating Power in our Planet-of-Cities in the Coming Quarter of 2018

December 21 marked the start of what Integral City calls the Power Quarter (from December 21 to March 20). What essence or Power do you call forth in your City in this season? What energy field, spirit, connecting rituals, renewing practices, lighten and enlighten you?  We share deep We-Spaces and gain inspiration from the creativity of the human spirit to Brush for Change across our planet of cities.

Visit us on the our Integral City Website and Blog or post a comment about your city interests on our Facebook page.

Meshful Blessings for our Planet of Cities from

Marilyn Hamilton and the Integral City Constellation Corps Team

PS Here are some FREE resources for empowering our Planet and the Human Hive:

  1. Integral City MetaBlog 2017 – A synthesis and index of all Integral City Blogs from 2017 (and links to 2016-15-14-13).
  2. Integral City of the Year 2017 – 3 Russian City Associations.
  3. Meshworker of the Year Award 2017 – Hub CoEvolució in Reus, Catalonia, Spain.