Structural (or building) intelligence represents the “ Its” space of the human hive. This intelligence connects us to the time-space realities of the city, that we see, feel, hear, smell, touch and taste. It gives us the capacity to structure and systematize our environment to sustain our complex adaptive life systems. City structures are made [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Integral City proposes that all cities have a purpose that serves Earth's sustainability and wellbeing. Glimmers that the value of purpose are breaking through into the world of organizational and business scorecards are showing up in the news and financial presss. The Toronto Board of Trade just released a report showing how 7 major U.S. [...]
This blog is the third prologue for a keynote at the FreshOutlook Feb. 27, 2012 Building SustainABLE Communities Conference. Integral City is a new paradigm for looking at cities that reveals its bio-psycho-cultural-structural evolutionary intelligences. These twelve intelligences cluster into five capacities and are organized into an Integral City Compass that provides direction and alignment [...]
Integral City 2.0 innovation systems are emerging because conscious capitalists, governments, students and citizens are aligning strategies for leaders, organizations and governance systems to transform entire cities from resistant holdouts to resilient human hives. Humans as Gaia’s most "reflective organ" have located 50% of our species' brain trust in the world’s cities. We are starting to see the shape of Integral [...]
How would we approach the built design for Integral City 2.0? Could we find a designer with the depths of consciousness, design repertoire, cultural acuity and systemic prowess to imagine Integral City 2.0 designs? I propose a likely candidate would be Architect, Mark DeKay to lead us with the wisdom of Integral Sustainable Design. In [...]
There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in. Leonard Cohen If City 2.0 is to support more life-giving options for behaviours, intentions, cultures and systems, City Economics 2.0 will have to emerge as an integral part of the whole. A pessimist would say we have been witnessing the disintegration of the old economy in [...]