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 SDG’s will only be effective if leadership takes action to respond to their data-driven signals. We know from systems theory that the place that has the most leverage to change within the city system is with the city leaders and stakeholders themselves. Leaders play such a vital role, because when leaders are willing and able to change they can gain an “overview” perspective of the whole system (Meadows, 2008). … So, it is critical to create the conditions where leaders from all 4 Voices of the city come to the table with the willingness to change. And willingness only comes when people care.

Hamilton, M. 2018. Integral City 3.7: Reframing Complex Challenges for Gaia’s Human Hives. Minneapolis, MN: Amaranth Press, LLC p. 295

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Gaia’s Reflective Organ Reflects on Power Over – Power With – Power As?

Note to Reader: This is a precis of the full editorial published here …[Full Editorial]

The December solstice opens the door to the theme of Power in the Human Hive. Gaia’s Reflective Organs (as individuals, collectives and human hives) have evolved through three eras of Power: Over, With and As.

Power Over

In today’s world too often, Power is associated with Power Over. The news delights in reporting the conflicts that Power Over engenders, and we regularly read about stories of Power Over at all levels of human scale from individual to family to organization to city and nation and planet. But the news is changing because those who have been the victims of Power Over are pushing back. Most of these resistors are staging their protest in cities – where nearly half of all people naturally live, work, relate and co-create. …[more]

Power With

In today’s VUCA circumstances, it is hard to imagine how Power Over could transform into Power With. But out of the ashes of the fires of human insecurity – related to climate, water, food, energy, culture and finance – has arisen a whole value chain of Power With service providers trying to meet the needs of the most destitute. The Not-for-Profits (NFP) and NGO’s have mustered the will and the way to build bridges between the developed nations and developing nations.

Power With brings into the power equation the power of feminine ways of knowing – the power emerging from the deepest relationships of bonding, belonging and caring. …[more]

Power As

Thus, Power With is creating the conditions for a more complex practice of Power As.

Power Over is dominator-based.

Power With is relationship-based.

Power As is consciousness-based.

Power As combines both the masculine and feminine sources of power into a fully human – or some would say even Gaian – source of power.

Power As recognizes that each person has the capacity to be purpose-driven in a way that can transcend and include domination for appropriate reasons, like responding quickly to disasters. Power As also transcends and includes relationships (for bonding, belonging and collaborating) to co-create and meshwork situation-responsive cultures and structures.

We see Power As enacted by those who have been willing to step into the fires caused by Power Over and Power With, witness the deepest truths (however uncomfortable), come along beside others (to strengthen and help them release their powerful capacities) and be open to learning why Nature, Life, Consciousness, Gaia (aka the Divine) has evolved us for a higher purpose.

We see Power As called forth by Dr. Monica Sharma who has worked at the UN so deeply, broadly, widely that she speaks of the Power we possess when we see the Practical, Political and Personal as a system with the capacities to meet any challenge.

Her colleague and scientist (and Nobel Laureate) Dr. Karen O’Brien integrates this wisdom into climate challenges researched by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) where she has served as a social scientist for 25 years.

Likewise, Terry Patten, Founder of State of Emergence and lifetime activist has shifted his influence on power into framing a “New Republic of the Heart” that explicitly reveals the heart-based intelligence that lies at the core of Power As.

Thomas Huebl’s online inquiry into Trauma and Healing and Charles Eisenstein’s vision of a “beautiful Earth we know is possible” also evoke and enact Power As.

On the city-scale Power As integrates all the intelligences – from Contexting to Individual to Collective to Strategic, into and as an Evolutionary intelligence.

Power As can be practised by individuals, empowered to tap into deep knowing or not-knowing (as Charles Eisenstein would suggest) in service to a purpose greater than any one person.

Power As can be practised by collectives, able and willing to act as WE-Holders, tuning into a Hive Mind (perhaps exemplified by Spiritual Activist Alistair McIntosh and his Scottish Land Reformers and the Lorian’s Subtle Activists tapping into the Subtle Realms as life partners from other different dimensions).

Power As would result in a worldview naturally arising from making decisions through the lens of the Master Code – to Care for Self, Others, Place and Planet.

Even as we have declared our current age to be the Anthropocene, we enter the era when Power As is called into being, because Power Over has been applied not only to every scale of human life but to every form of life on this planet. Power Over without the transmutation of Power With and Power As has proven to be ultimately disruptive, traumatizing and life-destroying.

Power As is also called forth because Power With seems powerless against Power Over. Power With has the best intentions to include Power Over in the dialogues and collaborations it imagines and attempts. But Power With fails to recognize the capacity for hijacking resources that Power Over can too easily manipulate. Only Power As is willing to speak Truth to Power Over and offer Appropriate Love (and not be naively manipulated) to Power With. Power As has the wisdom to act AS Life to realign and recalibrate the inappropriate use of the Powers that have evolved in earlier eras.

Gaia’s Reflective Organ Reflects

When we stand at this point in time and look backwards, it is too easy to simply condemn Power Over and Power With as incapable and unworthy. But each of those eras was powered by natural fuels that enabled the accumulation of power as wealth and knowledge that set the life conditions for the next Power to emerge.

Bio Fire – enabled Power Over. Cultural Power Over was powered by the forests and peat that could be collected from the Earth’s surface and support the spread of agriculture.

Fossil Fuels – enabled Power With. Without the accumulation of wealth enabled by fossil fuels, mined from below Earth’s surface, Power With culture could not have emerged to try to right the injustices caused by Power Over structures and systems.

Solar/Renewables – enable Power As. Without being able to source our energy needs from natural sources like the natural systems that build up life on Earth, we would not have the natural models, teachers, or sciences that show us how Power As is shared in Integral Ecologies and circular metabolisms.

When we look back at the evolutionary trajectory of Power Over, Power With and Power As we can appreciate that Power has always been a blessing and a curse in human life. But perhaps now, we have matured enough as a species that as we access and use our Power, we can take responsibility for the rules of engagement (and related authority) and relationships (and related influence) that Power As can reveal to us.

We look to the new faith practices (like subtle/spiritual activism), universal patterns of life-giving principles (like New Republic of the Heart) and holistic decision sets (like the Master Code) to guide us through the maturing of our stage of Power As.

May that be the legacy we will remember from this Age of the Anthropocene , with and as Gaia’s Reflective Organs.

This is a precis of the full editorial published here …[Full Editorial]

Anne-Marie Voorhoeve: Meshworker of the Year 2019

Anne-Marie is a strategist, social alchemist, social architect, innovative co-creator, experienced facilitator and expert in meshworking.

She focuses on the integral transformation of society into a sustainable world. She has decades of international experience with communities, businesses, networks, organizations, technology providers, groups of politicians, NGOs.

She enjoys designing, meshweaving and supporting complex multi-stakeholder projects that commit to meaningful and ambitious goals.

Recipient with the Club of Budapest of the Luxembourg Peace Prize 2017, Anne-Marie was inducted in 2019 as an Evolutionary Leader.

AMSTERDAM: Integral City of the Year 2019

Amsterdam, City of Water is Integral City of the Year 2019.

Amsterdam will be the city featured on the new cover of the Second Edition of Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences of the Human Hive.

Named European City of Innovation in 2017, Amsterdam hosted WeMakethe.City Festivals in 2018 and 2019 to celebrate the value of the city.

The beauty of these festivals was that they were not staged in a conference area but throughout the city in installations from the Food Fair to churches to the Eye. The city showed itself at the docks, in De Ceuvel and in outlying neighborhoods like the Kraiennest.

CELEBRATING 100: Dorothy Maclean Co-Founder Findhorn Community

Dorothy Maclean turns 100 on the 7th January 2020. At Findhorn we are celebrating her birthday all week:

Sunday the 5th of January
– 3-4.30 pm Celebratory sharing in the Universal Hall, followed by a fundraising event.
Tuesday the 7th of January
– 1pm Singing Happy Birthday at Dorothy’s window
– 4.30pm Lantern procession to the Original Garden from the runway for children at heart…
– 6 pm Celebration dinner and entertainment in the CC
Wednesday the 8th of January
– 5.15 pm Community Meditation in the Universal Hall dedicated to Dorothy.
Friday the 10th of January
– 7.45 pm The Rememberers – theatre performance directed by Laura Pasetti in the Universal Hall dedicated to Dorothy

Dorothy Maclean is the surviving founder of the Findhorn Community. Born in the town of Guelph, Ontario, Canada, Dorothy has lived an extraordinary life, modelling for all of us how to Co-Create with the Intelligences of Nature, Practise Deep Inner Listening, and Work as Love in Action (Findhorn’s 3 Principles).

If readers have been touched by Dorothy’s life and work then the Findhorn Foundation invites you to let her know that her life has mattered to you. You can send a card or short note of with an appreciation/gratitude to Dorothy. The cards and their messages will be read out to Dorothy, a few each day, so that her birthday lasts as long as possible.

The postal address is: Dorothy Maclean 100 birthday, ℅ The Findhorn Foundation, The Park, Findhorn, Moray, Scotland. IV36 3TZ.

Or email to: dorothy.birthdaywishes@findhorn.org

The Findhorn Foundation asks that you not write or contact Dorothy directly as these birthday greetings are going to be shared as an ongoing appreciation for her.

In lieu of flowers or gifts you can make a donation to the Community Care Circle Elders Fund

If you would like to know a bit more about Dorothy and her life then click here…

Upcoming Events for Integral City And Associates

Beyond Smart Online: Integral City Practices, Tools & Maps

For Practitioners. (Online)

This 3-day course online (each daily session is 90 – 120 minutes) introduces “practitioners” to just the basics of the Integral City model. You will learn the framework of practices, tools and maps that reveal the common patterns that impact the lives of individuals, organizations and communities within your city. This short course explores three powerful images animating Integral City systems – the integral map, the meshwork and the human hive. You will learn from your own situations and each other how the toolkit guides you beyond models for Urban Ecovillages and Traditional, Smart and Resilient Cities. (Each course repeats as 3 Days Online: 90 – 120 minutes each day – Feb. 7-9, 2020 , April 3-5, 2020, Nov. 27-29, 2020) Click here for MORE INFO

Beyond Resilient: Integral City Inquiry Action & Impact

For Catalysts.

This 4-day course is for “catalysts” to explore inquiry and action that inspires productive impact for reinventing today’s cities for the future. You will interact with the 4+1 Voices of the Integral City (Business, Local Government, Civil Society and Citizens, plus actors from other regional cities) to identify strategic possibilities. Integral City introduces you to new ways to think about, act in, relate to and reinvent the city as a Human Hive. Through placecaring and placemaking, we invite you to discover the unique contributions you make to its aliveness. We believe the future of cities will emerge not just from the bottom up through Smart City Technology or the top down through Resilient approaches – but from the integrated actions of the 4+1 Voices in all the cities in your eco-region, as you reinvent your Human Hives. (4 Days, Findhorn, Scotland, Oct. 10-14, 2020.) Click Here for MORE INFO

Beyond Complexity: Integral City Care Context & Capacity

For Meshworkers.

This 4-day course is for “meshworkers” to imagine how to reframe simplicity on the other side of complexity in the Integral City – or Human Hive. You will join graduates of prior training to build on the Integral City practitioner and catalyst competencies to apply new skills to a live case study. You will look at the city through the lenses of Care, Contexting and Capacity Building. You will view the city as a complex, adaptive living innovation eco-system, where the internal and external connections amongst the 4+1 voices of the city (Citizens, Civil Society, City/Institutional Managers, Business/Innovators (and other cities) enable conditions for thriving today. You will seek to align intra-city and inter-regional collaborations through caring for people, contexting for place and capacity building for purpose. This course introduces the practices of “meshworking”, so that practitioners who work with individual organizations and catalysts who build bridges between organizations can engage with the city as a whole. (4 Days, Findhorn, Scotland, Aug. 29 – Sept. 2, 2020). FOR MORE INFO CLICK HERE.

Learn how to use the MetaImpact Framework

with Sean Esborn-Hargens, Germany January 13 & 15, 2020

Design an integral KPI strategy for your mission-driven organization or project to measure what matters.

In a world that is rapidly becoming ever more complex at a near exponential rate, never has the measurement of the impact we are having in the world been so important! And yet, never has it been so confusing and overwhelming as to where and how to begin…

Now more than ever before, we have the opportunity to increase our impact beyond the financial growth orientation to work towards a future that supports wholeness and wellbeing in both human and ecological systems. Find out more and Register Here.

Key Perception Indicators – measuring how minds and hearts transform

Key Performance Indicators – measuring how bodies and behavior transform

Key Participation Indicator – measuring how relationships and culture transform

Key Production Indicators – measuring how environments and systems transform

The Facebook links are here for Cologne , January 13, 2020.

The Facebook links are here for Munich , January 20, 2020.

Join GEN Online Summit Communities of Future February 1-10 2020

The Communities for Future Summit is an entirely free, online experience hosted by the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN). From the 1 to 10 February 2020 we will daily unlock 3 interviews with well known thought leaders, change makers, indigenous elders, community lovers and youth activists from around the planet.

Register and Join now for free here

Integral City Book 1 Second Edition Released 2020

Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive, Second Edition 2 will be on the bookshelves in early 2020. This second edition describes the sciences behind the Integral City meta-model (many of which are clearly corroborated by Esbjörn-Hargens’ & Zimmerman’s Integral Ecology, DeKay’s Integral Sustainable Design, West’s Scale and Lovelock’s Face of Gaia). It also tracks the persistence of the “weak signals” that indicate evidence of the strengthening of the Integral City paradigm over the last decade.

The 12 chapters reveal the importance of 12 intelligences that are vital to the emergence of Gaia’s Reflective Organ at the scale of the city. In this new edition, they are grouped into 5 sets of intelligences as follows:

1. 1. 1. 1. Contexting (Ecosphere, Emerging, Integral, Living)
        
        Individual (Inner, Outer)
        
        Collective (Building, Storytelling)
        
        Strategic (Inquiry, Meshworking, Navigating)
        
        Evolutionary

This book and these intelligences update the Integral City Book Series which includes Integral City Inquiry & Action: Designing Impact for the Human Hive (2017) and Integral City 3.7: Reframing Complex Challenges for Gaia’s Human Hives.

Elisabet Sahtouris, Evolution Biologist, proposes in the new Foreword:

Every city can enhance its own health with the unique and wonderful tools of this book and its field book, which enable readers to go deeply into, and thus, truly understand, their city’s collective human psyche along with its physical infrastructure and thus to move forward in the way of genuine living entities. Read this book, share it with every ally you can, take it to your City Hall and get moving. There is a better world for us all ahead!

Systems Thinking for a Turbulent World

Systems Thinking for a Turbulent World will help practitioners in any field of change engage more effectively in transformative innovation. Such innovation addresses the paradigm shift needed to meet the diverse unfolding global challenges facing us today, often summed up as the Anthropocene.

Fragmentation of local and global societies is escalating, and this is aggravating vicious cycles. To heal the rifts, we need to reintroduce the human element into our understandings – whether the context is civic or scientific – and strengthen truth-seeking in decision-making. Aided by appropriate concepts and methods, this healing will enable a switch from reaction to anticipation, even in the face of discontinuous change and high uncertainty. The outcome is to privilege the positive human skills for collaborative navigation through uncertainty over the disjointed rationality of mechanism and artificial intelligence, which increasingly alienates us.

The reader in search of new ways of thinking will be introduced to concepts new to systems thinking that integrate systems thinking and futures thinking. The concept of anticipatory present moment (APM) serves as a basis for learning the cognitive skills that better enable navigation through turbulent times. A key personal and team practice is participative repatterning, which is the basis for transformative innovation. This practice is aided by new methods of visual facilitation.

The reader is guided through the unfolding of the ideas and practices with a narrative based on the metaphor of search portrayed in the tradition of ox herding, found in traditional Far Eastern consciousness practice.

Celebrating Planet-of-Cities in the Coming Quarter of 2019-2020

Between Darkness and Light, I will always walk and everywhere I walk I will open a window of light and plant a seed of love … Traditional Song

December 21 marks the start of what Integral City calls the Power Quarter (from December 21 to March 20). As our world becomes more Volatile Uncertain Complex and Ambiguous finding ways to ground our uncertainties and fears is becoming a resilience practice. How do you uplift your spirits and engage your purpose with Power as a Gaian Being? We continue to notice how cities are engaging their 4 Voices both seeking both internal and external coherence as a natural antidote to the toxicity and fear created by the failure to collaborate at international national climate conferences. If you could make your voice heard at a city scale what would you like to say about Climate Challenges, you are concerned about? Visit us on the our Integral City Website and Blog or post a comment about your city interests on our Facebook page.