With a process and a project like Imagine Durant, collective impact calls forth civic engagement in the present. But it also calls for a picture of a longer-term impact. The Integral City Book 1 is dedicated to the 7th generation from now – a horizon line adapted from the First Nations peoples who invoke [...]
When Imagine Durant embarked on it first Thought Leader Dialogue with the 4 Voices on the topic of Economy & Community they discovered the power of the Early Win. From the explorations of what was working around here, what was not working and what people envisioned for the future, participants discovered a shared longing. [...]
If the first injunction of aliveness is to survive, the second is to “connect with my environment”. Survival may seem like a one-person job, but that is mere illusion – for I survive in an ecology of relationships, actions, structures and infrastructures and nature herself. This “I/me/mine” depends on right behaviours, responding to cultures and [...]
Morel Fourman and his organization Gaiasoft have been working with cities and nations, for over a decade, particularly in Africa designing and implementing an electronic platform that enables strategic positioning for organizations within cities and across cities in the same country or continent. Morel’s work has provided systematic foundation building to strengthen city systems and [...]
Lovelock has proposed that humans are Gaia's reflective organ and I suggest that, in fact, individuals are cells in the cities who are the actual organs of a whole organ system now alive on Gaia. So with those thoughts in mind, perhaps we are at the seminal moment for us humans to consider not just how we have [...]
City of Organs Traditional Chinese medicine embraces a geography of the human body that reflects an energy flow model of the body, where energy cycles through the body organs along meridian pathways in daily rhythms. The Chinese refer to the body’s organs as “officials”. Map 1: 4 quadrant 8 level Map of City Organs [...]
I was intrigued to read recently about the Neo-Cities imagined by Yury Lifsitz. The concept seems very aligned to designing human hives. Bee - Human Hive - Tijmen Brozius By all accounts they design in many elements that give the city beauty, fitness to the environment and alignment with the intentions of the people who [...]
ZomBees? The Divine certainly has a sense of humour. Otherwise, I might not notice that in one week I read an article on the Zombie Cities in China – where the human hive has been built without a human to occupy them (yet) … and … An article on ZomBees – where the [...]
The hauntingly beautiful photographs by Caemerrer of China’s new – but empty – cities reminded me of Burtynsky’s photographs of industrial over-reach. Burtynsky Shipyard Burtynsky has recorded the disasters of the Modern industrial revolution in the form of photographs that display the patterns and textures of its very demise. But even in the [...]
The sight of China’s empty cities prompted colleague, Anne-Marie Voorhoeve to ask – “Why not house the refugees here?” What a logical question – that provides a solution in one country (China) to a problem in another country (Syria). Even if China were a democratic country, like the USA, housing refugees is a problématique [...]