There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in. Leonard Cohen If City 2.0 is to support more life-giving options for behaviours, intentions, cultures and systems, City Economics 2.0 will have to emerge as an integral part of the whole. A pessimist would say we have been witnessing the disintegration of the old economy in [...]
New research shows the power of the web to spread diversity and infect conformity by the provocation of weak signals. Farhad Manjoo from Slate reconsiders his(?) book True Enough's proposition that the web was narrowing networkers' worlds to the news/info selections that they chose. Now Facebook has released a study with an interesting design (based on millions [...]
Integral City has blasted into outer space! Or at least sub-orbital flight. Teaming up with astronaut, Dr. Mindy Howard, we are contributing to the Next Generation Sub-orbital Research Conference (Feb 27-29 Palo Alto). Check out Mindy and team's itinerary for blast off under Flight Training Peak Experience: Optimizing the Conditions of Inner Space for Outer Space. This is a [...]
The Integral City 2.0 embraces and develops human systems. It draws on the frameworks of complex human development of Ken Wilber, Don Beck, Clare Graves and Ervin Laszlo; living systems theory of James Grier Miller; ecological sustainability of William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel; resilience models of C.S. Holling et al; and bio-social-evolutionist dynamics of Jared Diamond [...]
An Integral City is a complex adaptive human system that concentrates habitat for humans like a bee hive does for bees. As a natural system it faces all the same issues, factors and challenges that affect the concentration of life anywhere: sustaining flows of information, matter and energy for the survival of human life. Serving [...]
What would Integral City contribute to TED's City 2.0 prize? City 2.0 is differentiated from City 1.0 primarily because it moves from being inward oriented to being outward oriented. City 1.0 cares for its residents (on good days) while Integral City 2.0 cares for the world by caring for its citizens and stewarding its place and space [...]
Consumerism is to our society what cancer is to our body, said Michael Dowd at the Integral Spiritual Experience. He brings attention to our evolutionary conundrum - why would we consume the reources of the planet in the same way that cancer cells consume the energy of the body?But how can we measure when we are in [...]
2011 may be the tipping point that globally shifted all the Pillars of Sustainability. By year-end each leans as precariously as four Towers of Pisa. First we watched the Environmental Pillar reign tsunami terror on the city of Sendai, followed by the infrastructural meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear plants, sending shock waves throughout the worldwide energy sector. Before we caught our breath [...]
Energy, information and matter tracking technology is revealing behavioral secrets of the Human Hive. Three of the best examples I've found are: Britain from Above - this BBC series explores explores the evolution of Britain's infrastructure development from agriculture to transportation, communication to education, and cities to rural redevelopment across the ages. Mesh Cities - a new website whose [...]
Cities can do nothing to promote economic development, according to Mario Polese. But are the development patterns he enumerates missing the patterns of development of human culture and consciousness? Polese traces the modern to post-modern fads that have influenced community economic development (CED) at the city scale from the 1960's to early 2000's: strategic industries, industrial complexes, [...]