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 People.
Communities and cities who care have the capacity to rapidly respond and evolve into new ways of being and becoming together. Research is showing that caring is core to the building of trust across the multiple scales of human systems and impacts the capacity to collaborate and generate impact (Weaver, 2017). (This is frequently evidenced as a shared intelligence when people respond with magnificent acts of generosity and capability, in times of crisis like [the Pandemic in 2020-21], Hurricane Harvey in 2017, Fort McMurray Fires in 2016, or Gander Newfoundland when the planes landed as a result of the World Trade Center strike in 2001.)
Hamilton, M. (2018). Integral City 3.7: Reframing Complex Challenges for Gaia’s Human Hives, Minneapolis, MN: Amaranth Press LLC, p. 64
Scroll to end of newsletter to access Free Resources.
World Unity Week Celebrates Capacities for a World of Peace
Integral City continues its contributions to the 11 way stations of Peace and Unity we recognized in World Unity Week 2020 . Now we are proud to join World Unity Week 2021, as Ambassadors who celebrate 8 qualities of Peace and Unity that grow up our cities as Gaia’s Reflective Organs of Care.
WUW 2021 potentiates a Planet of Integral Cities as Gaia’s Reflective Organ system. WUW 2021 calls forth eight capacities in service to Gaia’s peace and wellbeing for all our cities and ecoregions. Despite the challenges we face in a VUCA world, any and all cities can generate and regenerate positive qualities for Unity and Peace with these eight capacities.
Here is a brief summary of each capacity (for the full exploration click here) …
Belonging (4 Voices)
In every city there are 4 Archetypal Voices to which everyone can relate. We are all Citizens who belong to families, neighbourhoods, and communities. Belonging arises when we work together as Innovators … sharing our Faiths … and engaging our Civic Managers to enable city operations, education and health care institutions to serve our safety, convenience, learning and wellbeing.
Gratitude (Map 2)
The practise of Gratitude can be shared like a “supply chain” across the holarchy of human systems in the city and its ecoregion. … And within that supply chain each member can be grateful that the others play their part in a unified whole (or holarchy) that literally feeds us.
Compassion (Master Code of Care)
We can be moved to Compassion when we practice the Master Code of Care – reaching out from Caring for our Self to Care for Others – by sharing resources across all generations, accepting people for who and what they are, for being Grateful that Life supports us in whatever we have to share. … When we Care for Self, Others and Places then we are effectively Caring for our Planet – and thereby completing the cycle of the Master Code of Care.
Love (Map 5)
The emergence of Love as an expression of the Divine arises through us as individuals and collectives. Love can be as fundamental as the bonds between mother and child, or between marriage partners, or honouring our ancestors, or creating a legacy for future generations. Love is the trans-cultural expression of spirituality that all faiths share and all human societies long for.
Joy (Gaia’s Reflective Organ)
Joy is our natural condition when we have the comfort of Belonging, the blessing of Gratitude, the balm of Compassion and the mirror of Love. Joy emerges when we discover how the Purpose of our individual lives intersects with the greatest Need of the World. …When cities discover their Purpose in service to Gaia’s needs and all the 4 Voices of the City align to live it, then Joy is the natural outcome for all human systems at all scales.
Hope (Map 3)
Hope can build on the qualities of fractalness – where the capacities of high-performance individuals and teams can become patterns that mirror possibilities at community and whole city scales. Hope is contagious (like Love) and can create the conditions where we experience an “Island of Calm” within ourselves and from there “infect” others with Hope.
Unity (Map 5)
Unity arises in the Integral City because consciousness and culture align with behaviours and systems, across all scales. From our centres of calm and hope we can reconnect to our essential Oneness, recognizing that we are not apart from Gaia – but are unified as Earth – the very planet who has evolved us as Gaia’s Reflective Organs.
Peace (Map 1)
Peace is the natural condition of an Integral City. No matter how complex or chaotic our world might be, we can each find Hope on our Island of Calm. Through deep inner listening, working as love in action, coherent with the intelligences of Nature, we can invite as Allies all the qualities of Belonging, Gratitude, Compassion, Love, Joy, Hope and Unity to co-create from our Islands of Calm, a whole World of Peace.
To read the full editorial and itinerary Click Here.
Join us in the World Unity Week 2021 – click here for Free Registration.
Find our special events (see below) in the Meshworking Cities & Eco-regions Convergence Room.
CAN’s, Competition, Coalitions, Collaborations
As the world cycles in and out of lockdowns, pandemic levels and recovery stimuli, new webs are emerging through building, rebuilding, reconnecting and weaving systemic connections that seem to indicate a distinguishing impact of the global pandemic involves recalibrating worldwide interconnections.
How does Gaia respond when fundamental boundaries are crossed that result in ill health? (e.g., humans invading wild zones where microbiotic transfers like Covid19 can move from one species to another.)
Early on, in my education about systems thinking I learned (from Meg Wheatley) if you want to improve the health of a system connect it to more of itself. This is a fundamental principle of the Meshworking Intelligence (that restructures our brains as well as our organizations). The self-organizing operating system that is always in play has been forced to find many new solutions to connecting city systems to other parts of itself, while at the same time the parallel operating system that builds hierarchical structures has been challenged to reinvent itself many times over….
What appears to be happening, across the globe, is that human systems are connecting in novel ways at new scales in faster time. More than one ecology of human connectability at ever greater levels of complexity are finding expression in emergent human systems around the world. As a result, we may be witnessing not just the frustrations that arise from such massive change, but the early stages of improvements in the health of our human systems.
Through the multi-layered multiplicity of new connections from CAN’s, Competitive Ecosystems, Coalitions and Collaborations, self-organizing operating systems we are building new capacities in the structuring operating systems of our cities. We anticipate the intricate dance between self-organizing and structuring will evolve regionally (sooner rather than later?) into elegant meshworked ecologies of individual and regionally connected Integral Cities (as the next natural evolutionary stage of a planet of Integral Cities).
Upcoming Integral City & Constellation Events with People Purpose
| What | When | Time/Where |
| Beyond Smart: Practices Tools & Maps for the Human Hive |
August 27-29 3 x 2 hour sessions |
08:00-10:00PST 16:00-18:00 BST 15:00-17:00 CET |
| Beyond Resilient: Integral City Inquiry Action & Impact |
Wednesday September 9, 2021 |
16:00-18:00 BST 15:00-17:00 CET |
| Beyond Smart: Practices Tools & Maps for the Human Hive |
December 10-12 3 x 2 hour sessions |
08:00-10:00 PST 16:00-18:00 BST 15:00-17:00 CET |
| City Nestworking | Wednesday January 13, 2022 Trimester (12 weeks) |
08:00-10:00 PST 16:00-18:00 BST 15:00-17:00 CET |
| Beyond Smart: Practices Tools & Maps for the Human Hive | May 13 – 15, 2022 (3 x 2 hour sessions) (runs Friday, Saturday, Sunday) | 16:00-18:00 BST 15:00-17:00 CET |
| Foundations of Doughnut Economics (Ubiquity University) |
June 9 – June 30, 2021 | |
| MRA, Ubiquity University |
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Register any time. Choose Live and/or Self-Guided Learning at your own pace. |
| World Unity Week 2021 Free Registration, 500+ Speakers, 50 Convergence Rooms Integral City Sessions in:Meshworking Cities & Ecoregions Room |
June 19 – June 26, 2021
Meshworking Cities & Ecoregions Room: June 22, 23, 24, 25 |
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| FemmeQ Retreat and Global Gathering, To Ignite the Deep Feminine Intelligence needed for a Regenerative Future Blue Spirit Retreat, Nosara, Costa Rica. |
July 24th – 31st in person retreat |
Click here for Details & Registration |
| Introduction to Appreciative Inquiry (AI): learn to ask what is working, to amplify successes, and focus your “appreciative lens” VENUE – CCPE Beauchamp Lodge 2 Warwick Crescent, London UK W2 6NE |
Thursday & Friday 9 & 10 September 2021 9.30 – 4.30 BST |
Book and pay: contact suzanne@appreciatingpeople.co. |
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Keep abreast of our Integral City Events on the Mighty Network – just click here. Join Marilyn Hamilton/Integral City monthly for our free zoom InterViews from the Balcony Or join Beth Sanders/Nest City monthly for our free zoom Street Corner Visiting – – 8 pm BST – 4th Tuesday of the Month. |
Urban Hub 20 e-book is now available in Spanish – Translation by Raquel Torrent, Curator Marilyn Hamilton.
Urban Hub 20 imagines how the Power of the Master Code of Care can catalyze city change? Over 20 contributors show how their practices contribute to the wellbeing of the Human Hive as a whole, living, complex adaptive system. In collaborating for this volume, we offer a service to a VUCA World (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) – offering our integrally informed specialities to discover solutions for the world’s BIG challenges. As we emerge into the recovery stages of the pandemic (again), we know that the Integral City’ s Urban Hub 20 approach to People, Place and Planet offers powerful designs for regenerating wellbeing and enlivening the next stage of evolution for the Human Hive.
“This is a truly brilliant and much needed presentation. The author has brought together an extremely intelligent group of writers and thinkers to apply Integral principles to the problems and creative openings of city, regions, ecosystems, and the biosphere itself. Each one of these areas is treated as a living, complex, integral system, and the ways that they all mutually interact are fully explored, with the added benefit that they are all looked through an integral lens, insuring that a fully whole and complete path is taken. There is really no other approach like this available, and certainly none that give as full and comprehensive and inclusive an account. I can’t recommend this approach more highly, it truly touches a level of genius.” Ken Wilber—Sex, Ecology, Spirituality; The Integral Vision
New links for the e-book in English:
Celebrating Unity in Our Planet of Cities in the Coming Quarter of 2021
We will never be able to build what we have not first cherished in our hearts.” – Joanna Macy
June 21 marks the start of what Integral City calls the People Quarter (from June 21 to September 21 ). The world seems to be buzzing with the synaptic connections amongst teams, between community action networks, across coalitions for great causes and within the minds and hearts of people everywhere yearning and reaching out for Unity. What connections have you made in the last year that would never have happened without the pandemic lockdowns. What behaviours and processes do you long to renew, if you are in a place where restrictions from movement and physical association are being lifted? What might deep messages lie buried in our many calls to convergence? How can we amplify and nurture the seeds for cooperation and collaboration that can inpire our cities into their next natural evolutionary stage, with regenerative energy for achieving Social Justice and restoring our Ecological Balance?
Visit us on our Integral City Website and Blog or post a comment about your city interests on our Mighty Network.
Meshful Blessings of this Season Celebrating People in our Planet of Cities …
Marilyn Hamilton and the Integral City Constellation Corps Team
PS Here are some FREE resources for uplifting Integral City People:
- Mark DeKay, 5-lecture series on Integral Design and Research from luav Venice 2021. The playlist of recordings is here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QADYQ5hCvZk&list=PLupJvAA-uIP4lpqUQ_S5CIyaFrl-138Yq
- Lalit Kishor Bhati, Auroville: Soul in Action https://www.swadharma.auroville.org/
- Daniel Christian Wahl, Designing Regenerative Cultures Spanish now available here:https://ecohabitar.org/producto/disenando-culturas-regenerativas/
- Thomas Huebl, The Anatomy of Inaction: Climate Complexity Changehttps://thomashuebl.com/the-anatomy-of-inaction-climate-complexity-change/?inf_contact_key=7da0581d49117a4d3d25aa31ba1f4d66680f8914173f9191b1c0223e68310bb1
- Climate Complexity Change”, unpsychology magazine, Issue 7, Spring 2021. The issue has 146 pages and contains many excellent articles on climate change, and also artistic works! You can download the complete magazine free of charge here
- Duane Elgin, Facing Adversity: Choosing Earth, Choosing Life, film and book https://choosingearth.org/video/
- Johan Rockstrom at Planetiers 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Cwr_hEDYt0&t=1s
- Color and the Built Environment Conference https://colorimpact2021.com/Link to talk available here: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/recording/3188408213643993346
- For children: Isn’t it time we all pull together ?- here is the video Peter Anderson, VocalEyes made with Broad Haven Primary schools, UK
- Integral City Blogs
- Integral City & Doughnut Economics
- Integral City Thought Experiment 1: Exploring Doughnut Economics & Spiral Dynamics
- Thought Experiment 2 Egocentric Worldview: Spiral Dynamics, Integral City & Doughnut Economics
- Thought Experiment 3 Ethnocentric Worldview: Spiral Dynamics, Integral City & Doughnut Economics
- Thought Experiment 4 Regionalcentric Worldview: Spiral Dynamics, Integral City & Doughnut Economics
- Thought Experiment 5 Globalcentric Worldview: Spiral Dynamics, Integral City & Doughnut Economics
- 5+ Ways to Regenerate our Cities with Doughnut Economics
- Doughnut Economics Scholarships for Master Regenerative Action
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- Integral City & Doughnut Economics
2. Integral City Awards & Events
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- World Unity Week Celebrates Capacities for a World of Peace
- Meshworker of the Year 2021: Jim Garrison, Humanity Rising
- Moments of Mass Mindfulness – MOMM – May 9, 2021
- Integral Europe Conference 2021 – the Future of our Collective Evolution
- Integral Europe Conference 2021 – Join Integral City
- World Unity Week 2021 – Let’s Do Something for World Unity
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3. Integral City in Practice
4. Dharma Teaching
11. Newsletters Past Issues 2020 -2021
- Integral City Reflective Organ – March Equinox 2021 – Translate Care for Gaia with Impact, Training, Story
- Integral City Reflective Organ — December Solstice 2020 – Cities Waking Up, Growing Up
- Integral City Reflective Organ – September Equinox 2020: Places of Unity Peace and Partnership
- Integral City Reflective Organ – June Solstice 2020: Lockdown Wakes Up the Human Heart
- Integral City Reflective Organ March Equinox 2020: Superordinate Goal in a VUCA World
8. Integral City MetaBlog 2020 – A Synthesis and index of all Integral City Blogs from 2020
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