Health emerges because the structures we have created sustain us through relatively stable times and life conditions. When these structures have built-in flexibility they are also resilient and create the conditions for an energetic city. This means that my bio-physical self can respond to the changes in my environment and access to energy, including other [...]
Our senses are our biological evidence gathering mechanisms. They gather the data that stimulate both automatic behavior (like eye blinking, flinching, sneezing, gagging) and intentional behavior. Intentional behavior involves choice and therefore consciousness. A city without intelligence sufficient to its complexity is a city that has lost touch with its senses. A senseless or sense [...]
Outer intelligence is the biological "It" space of the citizen — the space where the body acts and behaves. Behaviors demonstrate our inner intelligence in action. Demographics are key determinants of our intentional, cultural and social capacities, because they represent the bodies through which our intentions, cultures and systems are delivered. If we want to understand [...]
Inner intelligence is the "I" space of each citizen. At the scale of the individual I am (virtually) the city's mind from which emerges the city's cognitive, emotional and cultural capacities. This "I" is capable of reflection and learning - not just once - not just in a linear way - but through the many [...]
The Inner intelligences of the human condition relates to a person's subjective sense of wellbeing and happiness. The Subjective I is the psycho-emotional-spiritual way I experience the city. The Subjective I feels inspired and uplifted by the personal pleasure of walking down a street lined with cherry blooms, imagining the excitement of expressing ideas, with [...]
The Human Hive is powered by individuals. This is rather paradoxical because it is the collection of people that we tend to notice in the Human Hive. But the collective (or in terms of the Integral Model, the social holon) is composed of individual holons. Individual people are whole systems who power and empower the [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
At the Building Sustainable Communities conference, accelerating the development of leaders, was the topic of a three-way lunch, I enjoyed with Milenko Matanovic (Founder of the Pomegranate Center) and Michael Simpson (Founder of One Sky). We were all curious about how to do that and what had worked in our lived experience as leadership development designers. Milenko related the [...]