Integral City how do we honor the many systems, structures and infrastructures that have emerged to shape you ? Map 4 offers us a cartography of organizational forms so we can appreciate how many functions serve the complexity of city life. Integral City Map 4: The Complex Adaptive Structures of Change The built structures [...]
Integral City how do I map thee? Let me count the ways ... starting with Map 1. Map 1: 4 quadrant 8 level map of the city When I started to explore the Integral framework for cities I was influenced both by the work of Ken Wilber and Don Beck's Spiral Dynamics model. [...]
The patterns embedded in human systems have evolved for hundreds of thousands of years. Indeed, as living systems, the patterns have emerged from the 4 billion years that Life has vibrated on the dance floor of the Planet, as single cell microbes to multi-organ persons. These patterns emerge from expressing the simple rules [...]
Is information in your city easy to come by? or is it difficult to make sense of your city because information is scarce or misaligned? Information in the Integral City is critical to the city's functioning, wellbeing and thriving. But when we are overwhelmed by electronic news blasts it can be difficult to know what [...]
How can we apply Integral City theory or frameworks to my city? This is a question I am often asked. At the What Next Integral Conference, Roger Walsh offered some helpful suggestions for applying Integral Theory in general. These are also a useful approach to engaging Integral City practices. 1. Step 1 is to offer an [...]
Integral Intelligence is a way of looking at the city that transcends and includes views of the city that are traditional (the city as home), modern (the city as economic engine), post-modern (the city as social safety net) and systemic (the city as living human system). Integral Intelligence at the city scale embraces all the [...]
The four quadrant perspectival map of reality (bio-psycho-cultural-social) can be shape-shifted into a nested holarchy of city holons. This scalar fractal map shows the relationship amongst the micro, meso and macro human systems at multiple levels of scale from the individual to the family/group, organization, sector, community, city, eco-region and the world. Integral intelligence looks at [...]
Integral Intelligence arises because the city, is a whole system, with multiple simultaneous realities that reflect - how people act, how people think, how people relate and how people create/produce. Integral Intelligences can be mapped into the four quadrants explored by the AQAL model developed by Ken Wilber. The four quadrants are a beautiful fractal [...]
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 [...]
Are economics and technological factors sufficient to incubate innovation and sustainability? At least they are a start to consider the importance of cities to organizational success. That was a recent focus of Greenbiz forum where the growing recognition that the wellbeing of cities is an underlying condition for the success of organizations. Drawing from a [...]