Recovering Cities Through Living Cities Peace Room (3/4)

How Might We Heal?

Designing a healing process for the war will call us to address all that is broken in the cities and nations. Living Cities can develop a design strategy by using the same 10 capacities as we identified above in What is Broken? – but in a different sequence as suggested below – where the sequence from the What is Broken? shows in parentheses.

1. (8) Practise the Master Code of Care (MCC) to expand our circles of compassion. (Hamilton)

A fundamental place to start is with the MCC because it provides an ethic for Peace, a theory of change and a practice to calm the inflamed and damaged systems.

2. (9) Nurture Human Security as Ecology for Peace. (Hamilton, Buhaug O’Brien et al)

Recognizing that safety and security is a human right that is fundamental to every stage of development and manifestation of human habitats will depend on the MCC – but must be held by trusted others who have not been party to the conflict (on either side). Safety and security must start small with individuals and families and embrace the city block by block. This can be tied into the next step of creating a Peace and Conflict Restoration process (e.g. Truth and Reconciliation commission).

3. (10) Manage Peace and Conflict with the 4 Voices as Community, acting as a 3rd Side able to engage any issue and heal trauma, pain, injustice, conflict, pollution, degradation. (Ury, Huebl)

In this stage, the 4 Voices of Community (Citizens, Civic Managers, Business/Innovators, 3rd Sector) must be found and strengthened so that they can have the courage to engage issues, damages, and injuries in any of the 4 areas of reality (bio, psycho, cultural, systems). They will likely need strong representatives from other cities who can come in and incubate assemblies for Recovery (and reconciliation).

4. (1) Recognize cities as complex adaptive living systems with 5 sets of intelligences for surviving, adapting to our environments and regenerating. (Hamilton, Capra)

Cities must be honoured as living systems who have intelligences at all scales from individual to collective to organizations, neighbourhoods, communities and are embedded in bioregions. They need to use the contexting and strategic intelligences guided by the evolution impulse of the Master Code of Care.

5. (2) Learn Biomimicry lessons that reveal our cities are human hives – powerful resilient collectives, like the beehive is for bees. (Hamilton, Bloom, Benyus)

When we look at regenerating cities as human hives, we will consider not only the rehabilitation of bricks and mortar but the lives of individuals, relationships and purposes and values embedded at every scale of the city. Looking at how Nature can recover from natural disasters can give us inspiration and impetus to learn how best to be effective in our recovery efforts.

6. (3) Co-exist with 4 realities that inspire our lives through: intentions, cultures, behaviors, systems. (Wilber, Hamilton)

We can use these 4 realities to look for early wins to build capacities for recovery. This will include individual cities and the people and organizations from the rest of the world – always keeping in mind to embrace the 4 realities as co-arising, co-existing dimensions enables us to be most impactful (and should be based on the strata of Needs).

7. (4) Empower 4 ways of knowing through multiple perspectives: subjective, intersubjective, objective, interobjective. (Wilber)

We can empower people’s recovery by using 4 approaches/epistemologies/strategic designs that embrace all our senses, intelligences, response-abilities in the 4 Quadrants. We bring in specialists for 4 Quadrants and work as recovery teams – co-operating and co-laborating with locals.

8. (5) Serve the Purpose of Peace with the 4 Voices in our human hives (like the 4 roles in the beehive: Citizens/Producers, Business-Innovators/Diversity Generators, Resource Allocators/Civic Managers, Inner Judges/3rd Sector). (Hamilton)

We make room for the activities of all 4 Voices to serve Peace as we rebuild capacities. We keep Peace as an integrating/uniting Purpose in service to Planet/Place/People/Person.

9. (6) Mature species development beyond the stage of competition into the stages of cooperation and collaboration – in other words Peace. (Sahtouris).

We help the city systems discover what resources they can contribute, how their needs are being met – and create the life conditions for recovery to emerge. We need to meet them where they are at and help them regrow full, healthy capacities for living (surviving, connecting with the environment and regenerating).

10. (7) Grow our Cities through steps and stages that scale the Capacity for Peace. (Eddy, Hamilton)

We are mindful of Gaia’s stratified elements/capacities and design Journey for Peace to respect and recover how life depends on life in an ecosystem of Peace. We help the city design its own steps and stages and link individual cities to others in their bioregion so they can help each other.