The city has the qualities of aliveness. It springs from the fact that each person in the city is alive, but also because all the people are alive together in the city - interconnected as individuals, families, groups and generations. How vibrant is the health of your city? What do you notice about the vitality [...]
As the city becomes more complex individuals, organizations, and community systems interconnect and interplay. Life and death and the health of the city are very much reflected in healthy alignment of the many systems that make up the whole city system (or holarchy). These different scales of city systems co-exist at different stages of their [...]
Living intelligence relates to the aliveness of each citizen through each of their lifecycle stages and the aliveness of the city through its lifecycle stages. These interlocking lifecycles are powerful fractal relationships that impact how each person, organization and community contribute to the wellbeing of the city. At each of these scales we go through [...]
Emergent Intelligence helps us not only see the city as a whole but to design it as a whole. This gives us a chance to tap into our human hive mind – a mind that transcends and includes our individual minds. This condition arises because each person is massively interdependent on a living collective system [...]
Emergent Intelligence in the city enables survival, adaptation and regeneration of the whole human system. Last week I was exploring how designers apply Emergent Intelligence in Arnhem, NL working with Alliander and Freedom Lab to explore Energetic City 2050. Over the next six months, three teams are exploring how people in the city could generate their [...]
Emergent Intelligence is the intelligence that drives resilience. This gives the city the qualities of aliveness: it not only survives, but it adapts and regenerates. This intelligence enables the city to emerge as the bio-psycho-cultural-social behaviors, intentions, relationships and systems of its citizens interact with the environment they co-create as well as the eco-regional environment [...]
Could it be that we are witnessing an inflection point in the global awareness and embrace of sustainability? Sean Esborn-Hargens one of the leaders at the forefront of developing the whole field of Integral Ecology engages the nested voices of Self, Other and the World in ways that are shifting the whole understanding of ecology. Like [...]
Integral Cities in different locations must adapt differing solutions to the same infrastructure problems. We need to evolve our internal environments and design our external environments in ways that honour the ecosphere that we are inextricably a part of . Only by doing so can both individual and collective human life optimize the amazing diversity our DNA has gifted us [...]
Ecosphere intelligence is an awareness and capacity to respond to the realities of a city's climate and eco-region environment. Just as honey bees adapt themselves to different geographies, Integral Cities in different locations must adapt different solutions to the same infrastructure problems. Ecosphere intelligence is fundamental to our energy security, food security and water security. If we [...]
Two years ago this blog suggested that Cuba offered a great case study for Cities Under Peak Oil conditions. Subsequent to that blog Jim Garrison interviewed me for Integral Life about my book Integral City. We talked about The New Cuban Revolution: how the fairly surprising case study of Havana, Cuba offered insights to the sustainability discussion. After the fall of [...]