How do we create an education system for the City 2.0 that the TED Prize 2012 imagines? How can we learn to integrate education with innovation, culture, and economic opportunity? When might we agree to reduce the carbon footprint of City 2.0 occupants, facilitate smaller families, and ease the environmental pressure on the world’s rural areas? What will inspire us to create a place [...]
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 [...]
New research shows the power of the web to spread diversity and infect conformity by the provocation of weak signals. Farhad Manjoo from Slate reconsiders his(?) book True Enough's proposition that the web was narrowing networkers' worlds to the news/info selections that they chose. Now Facebook has released a study with an interesting design (based on millions [...]
The Integral City 2.0 embraces and develops human systems. It draws on the frameworks of complex human development of Ken Wilber, Don Beck, Clare Graves and Ervin Laszlo; living systems theory of James Grier Miller; ecological sustainability of William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel; resilience models of C.S. Holling et al; and bio-social-evolutionist dynamics of Jared Diamond [...]
2011 may be the tipping point that globally shifted all the Pillars of Sustainability. By year-end each leans as precariously as four Towers of Pisa. First we watched the Environmental Pillar reign tsunami terror on the city of Sendai, followed by the infrastructural meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear plants, sending shock waves throughout the worldwide energy sector. Before we caught our breath [...]
Energy, information and matter tracking technology is revealing behavioral secrets of the Human Hive. Three of the best examples I've found are: Britain from Above - this BBC series explores explores the evolution of Britain's infrastructure development from agriculture to transportation, communication to education, and cities to rural redevelopment across the ages. Mesh Cities - a new website whose [...]
Integral City Developers #occupy the positive 1% who generate diversity to overcome the blockages and barriers in city systems. They #occupy development opportunities grand enough to attract others but where the economic risk is designed to reward purpose, priority, profit, people and planet. Developers #occupy the Integral City Voice with visions, inspiring pictures and projects that call forth [...]
The wise evolution of cultural affinities and loyalties is something nations must pay careful attention to, warns Ayaan Hirst Ali in a National Post article documenting her personal history. In fact it appears from her advice that it is a maxim that cities must understand in order to evolve governance that works in their post-modern pluralistic [...]
Evolutionary Enlightenment, by Andrew Cohen is a refreshingly enlivening read that aligns well with the Evolutionary Intelligences of Integral City. Cohen, starts with the traditional path of enlightenment as the starting place for practitioners to achieve a deep knowing of the evolutionary experience of the "Big Bang". His description of this as not only a scientific proposition, [...]
Metropolitan World Atlas (MWA)by Arjen van Susteren gives us a glimpse of what an atlas of Integral City acupuncture points might look like. MWA identifies 101 metroplitan areas of the world which include the world's 50 largest cities, 25 largest seaports, 30 largest airports, 30 largest telecom ports and 12 other metropolitan areas. The atlas [...]