At IEC 2025, Said Dawlabani stood once again at the crossroads of history and evolution. Known for his work with Spiral Dynamics integral and as author of Second Sapiens (for which I was honoured to write the foreword) and Memenomics, Dawlabani invited us to see today’s upheavals as part of a profound life cycle [...]
Tough Love and Collective Responsibility Every living system evolves. Ecovillage Findhorn is no exception. As our governance structures shift from the legacy of the Findhorn Foundation Scottish Charity Incorporated Organisation (SCIO) toward a more community-based model, we are learning what it means to embrace tough love alongside collective responsibility. Entanglement Recently, I have [...]
The Integral City GPS image is the central guiding metaphor to use for navigating the 5 Sets of Integral City Intelligences. This is more dynamic and systemic than the quadrant model alone, as it shows relational flow, directionality, and the evolutionary propulsion of the city as a living system. Let's explore the GPS structure in [...]
This is an invitation, to explore this page: https://integralcity.com/voices-intelligences/, which outlines the 12 Intelligences of the Integral City across four quadrants: (Upper Left: Individual-Interior, Upper Right: Individual-Exterior, Lower Left: Collective-Interior, Lower Right: Collective-Exterior). Notice how deeply these Intelligences align with Beauty, Truth, and Goodness. Let’s explore how these Intelligences connect cities to their Souls [...]
As summer unfurls across the Northern Hemisphere, and winter expands across the Southern hemisphere, the natural world reminds us: transformation is not linear. It is a dance of unfolding — messy, mysterious, and necessary. In the same way that caterpillars surrender to the chrysalis, cities around the world are entering their own season of [...]
As the Human Hive navigates the metamorphic threshold from breakdown to breakthrough, the question facing every urban steward is not just how to sustain, but how to regenerate. In his thoughtful post, “10 Reasons Why Urban Environment Stakeholders Should Cultivate Regeneration,” Menno Lammers outlines a compelling case for why cities must evolve beyond extractive [...]
What will it take for us to preserve what remains of life on the planet? Is humanity itself at risk? These are the overarching questions that Said Dawlabani asks in his new book Second Sapiens: The Rise of the Planetary Mind and the Future of Humanity. Second Sapiens answers the question: what would Mother [...]
This year’s Integral City Award is to an ecosystem with three sub-systems each of which and all together are demonstrating Integral City Intelligences. The first subsystem is Neighbourhood Parliaments – now often know as Neighbourhood Democracy or Neighborocracy. The second is Children’s Parliaments. The third sub-system is SONEC. Let’s consider the “organs” in [...]
Have cities been created by humans or have they been evolved by Gaia as organs to enable consciousness at a scale that upshifts Gaia’s intelligence? Humans as a relatively young species have imagined that we control the world. If we are in service to Gaia, it must be we who create capacities that have [...]
Our universe started with a Big Breath (not a Big Bang) – so affirms cosmologist, Jude Currivan, author of The Story of Gaia. And from that breath released over 14 billion years ago, in-formation has guided matter and energy to manifest all life – including this planet and all she has created. Gaia [...]