I had another brush with fear yesterday when I read the Climate Primer released by the Melbourne Climate Action Centre called 4 Degrees Hotter. Ironically I had just finished teaching at Royal Roads University, the inaugural Sustainable Community Development Graduate Certificate, with a Challenge focused on a Climate Action Plan for a BC City. I had completed the literature [...]
I spent last week at Royal Roads University delivering the first Residency of the Sustainability Graduate Certificate. Ten students from across Canada provided a rigorous proving ground for the Integral City approach to sustainability. Using the Integral City Compass to prove the design with three leverage points, here is what we did. Integral City Compass [...]
February Greetings, Integral City-zens and Friends of Integral City Today's Integral City Sparkie for the City Heart : Through the negotiation of relationships, boundaries are recognized, linked, crossed, embraced, broken, denied and redefined. Hamilton, M., 2008, Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive, p.182 As I write, the clashes in the Middle East have the rest [...]
Events in Egypt this last week show how the consciousness of people in the rural area that serves cities can ignite a whole culture. The amazing pictures of hundreds of thousands marching in Cairo and the Mubarak government's progressive retreat in the face of the population's fearless demands mark what the media call a "regime change". [...]
Last week the National Post (NP) ran a most interesting series on the death of personal responsibility . Many of the reporters spoke nostaligically of a time when life was determined by the decisions of individuals and families unmitigated by the so-called nanny state . This vociferously argued dialectic seems to me a false one. It [...]
Further to my interview with Will Varey in Perth about emergence in the city (also see Blog) we talked about the dilemma that in one location we have multiple cities. Effectively each citizen carries around a unique mental model of the city and through the magic of self-organizing systems we negotiate this complex territory. The [...]
In yesterday's National Post two stories intrigued me that ultimately relate to resources available to the Human Hive. They appeared without linkage to each other but they raised bridging questions for me. The first article was about a Super Human Hive - a megacity that China has plans for turning the Pearl River Delta into [...]
I have just finished editing an interview I did with one of Integral City's Advisors, Will Varey, of Emergnc in December, 2010. It will be posted for readers' listening pleasure on Meshcasts later today. We had a most wide-ranging dialogue that explored cities as living systems. Will's grounding in sustainability provided a "pingable" trampoline to explore the ecology [...]
A domesticated cousin to the apis melifera honey bee, is raising questions about how life conditions - including those created by humans - can offer a species the opportunity to expand its territory because of its natural but transplanted capacities. It is a good example of unintended consequences, and may prove to us (yet again) that resilience [...]
A few days ago a trusted colleague, John Steiner, sent me an email thread that told the story of an interesting Japanese invention - a machine that converts plastic into oil. You can see a video for yourself if you click here. This machine answers a question I have harboured for years, and that is: if plastic [...]