As a follow up to my blog on the Systems and Resilience Cycles for the Restoration of Sendai, Integral City Spiritual Advisor, Terry Patten blogs a much needed set of practices for dealing with the News - good, bad and otherwise. Terry says: "The news so far during 2011 has been particularly electrifying: Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, [...]
The weak signals that diasporas emit into and outside of systems reported earlier this week is the subject of a new book. Parag Khanna, a Distinguished Visitor at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto has just released "How to Run the World". Excerpts in today's National Post read: "In the Middle [...]
The watch continues as events unfold in North African and the Middle Eastern cities and countries. We wonder whether and how autocracies in these places may be superseded by autocracy, theocracy or even democracy? Each country is different so most informed observers don't expect that a single solution will emerge across all countries. From the outside of this area, all we can see [...]
This was the keynote speech delivered by Dr. Marilyn Hamilton at Globe Forum, Dublin November 17, 2010 Thank you for this invitation to share what I am learning about cities as innovation ecosystems. James Lovelock – innovator of the Gaia hypothesis – says that humans are Gaia’s most reflective organ. That means that evolution has [...]
I spent last week at Royal Roads University delivering the first Residency of the Sustainability Graduate Certificate. Ten students from across Canada provided a rigorous proving ground for the Integral City approach to sustainability. Using the Integral City Compass to prove the design with three leverage points, here is what we did. Integral City Compass [...]
February Greetings, Integral City-zens and Friends of Integral City Today's Integral City Sparkie for the City Heart : Through the negotiation of relationships, boundaries are recognized, linked, crossed, embraced, broken, denied and redefined. Hamilton, M., 2008, Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive, p.182 As I write, the clashes in the Middle East have the rest [...]
Last week the National Post (NP) ran a most interesting series on the death of personal responsibility . Many of the reporters spoke nostaligically of a time when life was determined by the decisions of individuals and families unmitigated by the so-called nanny state . This vociferously argued dialectic seems to me a false one. It [...]
In yesterday's National Post two stories intrigued me that ultimately relate to resources available to the Human Hive. They appeared without linkage to each other but they raised bridging questions for me. The first article was about a Super Human Hive - a megacity that China has plans for turning the Pearl River Delta into [...]
I have just finished editing an interview I did with one of Integral City's Advisors, Will Varey, of Emergnc in December, 2010. It will be posted for readers' listening pleasure on Meshcasts later today. We had a most wide-ranging dialogue that explored cities as living systems. Will's grounding in sustainability provided a "pingable" trampoline to explore the ecology [...]
A few days ago a trusted colleague, John Steiner, sent me an email thread that told the story of an interesting Japanese invention - a machine that converts plastic into oil. You can see a video for yourself if you click here. This machine answers a question I have harboured for years, and that is: if plastic [...]