How is a masterfully crafted and portrayed story like Downton Abbey (currently being aired on PBS Masterpiece Theatre) an analog for today's down town world scene? Set in an English stately home just before WWI, the story is about the shifting of worldviews from traditional to modern. It uses cracks in the system of land/estate ownership, class and gender [...]
Detroit in ruins: The Photographs of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre In downtown Detroit, the streets are lined with abandoned hotels and swimming pools, ruined movie houses and schools, all evidence of the motor city's painful decline. The photographs of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre capture what remains of a once-great city – and [...]
Rumi said that "for every garden we tend without, we tend 10,000 gardens within". Such is the power of consciousness. It is our leverage beyond the material world into an imaginary/imagining world with infinite possibilities and directions for growth. I am always looking for the natural laboratories that show us how communities self-organize and emerge into [...]
One of the things I like about the Holland America cruises is the ship's log they give at the end of the voyage. It is an interesting accountability document for key resources, especially water and fuel. My recent cruise on the MS Rotterdam used 120 tons/day of fuel to travel a toal of 3529 nautical [...]
When you are looking for weak signals about the toughness of economic times look to see how business keeps the revenues flowing. I just returned from a floating city holiday aka a cruise. The travel industry has been hit in so many ways from terrorist threats, biological invasions and economic down cycles it is interesting [...]
Globe Forum Dublin ...cities are very much social-ecological systems. Cities represent the hopes and dreams of the people that live in them and they also represent perhaps the best hope for reversing large-scale ecological decline, social breakdowns and economic stagnation. Each session though had its own flavour.... The final speaker was the blue-sky thinker, Dr [...]
November Greetings, Integral City-zens and Friends of Integral City Today's Integral City Sparkie for the City Brain : … a tension in favor of the values and behavior that are most coherent with the current life conditions will tend to be maintained. The flip side of this behavior is that the dominant culture will protect itself against [...]
Further to the Australian Federal Elections reported here in September. And the US Elections completed two weeks ago, I am noticing more action in the human hive, that says Resource Allocators and Inner Judges are busy trying to decide what to do next. The US Elections brought similar results to those in Australia -- very [...]
At the World Planners Congress (WPC), in June, 2006 I witnessed a notable public paradigm shift when Planning Leaders from around the world issued a position paper on the New Urban Planning (Farmer et al., 2006). In 2006, the authors stated that New Urban Planning was smart planning because it is a responsive learning system. [...]
Marilyn Hamilton talks to host John Schmidt of Avastone Consulting re Integral City on Zoomd Radio. Click here for the link. We talked about the Integral City as the Human Hive - and how that enables Leadership, Relationships and Resilience. Examples that were used included New Orleans and Burning Man. Listen to the broadcast or download it [...]