Integral City Maps Restory Human Systems & Climate Change
How do the 5 Maps used by Integral City make visible the wholeness of the human hive, when we consider Climate Change?
Each of the maps gives us different perspectives to view the patterns of wholeness – through stories. (Moreover, the Integral City maps reveal the consciousness and culture changes that Doughnut Economics depends on to realize AQAL development that brings human systems back into balance with all living systems.)
This is the story of Map 4.

Integral City Map 4 draws back from the patterns of individual agency and embraces the systems of human complexity – the organizations that humans have created.
Born into a world in balance with itself, the organizational forms of family hearth, clan gathering and dominator hierarchies co-existed with the life conditions of their eco-regions. Humans were able to supply their needs from the bounty of the land.
The very success of these organizational forms, evolved development paths that lead to agricultural exploitation and bureaucratic oversight. Humans began the slippery slide into times when human demands started to exceed the capacity for natural resources in proximate eco-regions to supply human wants. At the same time, the life conditions of plenty enabled the emergence of innovation, invention and industry that not only exploited the availability of natural resources, but produced wastes, air,soil and water pollution and damaged the fabric of the earth.
As industrial production was applied not only to the manufacture of goods and infrastructures, it was also applied to the mining, deforestation, fishing and extrapolation of the planet’s essential elements.
With the technology to exploit earth resources, came the technology to measure and view the damage on all the scales we explored in Maps 1, 2 and 3. Both from the microscope looking at biological insights and the telescope trained back on earth from space, we could see the impact humans were having on every natural system. And we could see the influence of the organizational systems impacting the very climate that embraced the planet.
Map 4 is potentially a joyous map of Nature’s capacity to evolve ever more elegant and complex systems – but it also reveals the journey that humans must now take to transcend, include and recalibrate human complexity in order to re-balance human organization with Nature’s living organs.
If we want to replace the story of climate disasters embedded in Map 4, we must retell the story of human dignities represented in Map 4. We must be able to proudly show how Map 4 is the story of Planetary Organizations that serve as complex adaptive systems.
To start our journey of recalibration, we must ask the difficult questions that arise from Map 4 as we contemplate how disasters can be converted and/or regenerated as dignities:
- How do our External Structures correlate with Internal Structures? How do we need one to hold the other?
- Within each structure how do we recalibrate the 4 Voices to match relevant life conditions? What does each Voice have to say about Climate? What role do organizational worldviews and their resulting actions have on climate?
- How does use of fuels/energy impact the climate and the planet? How have we transmuted with our fuel systems from biological to animal to fossil fuel to rewable energy as the ways we power our human organizations?
- How do cities act as Complex Adaptive Systems with all organizational types embedded in them?
- How can organizations contribute to the regeneration of human systems?
- What would happen if we found the “right size” of cities? (Is it the Sweet Spot of Mark McCaffrey in the Power of 10,; namely 50k to 100k)?
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