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 [...]
How do you engage Collective Shadow? How do you design a process for sustainability leaders to address the shadow of self, of the group and of the planet? That was a question that we asked ourselves during the Embody Integral Sustainability inquiry during August 2011 at Venwoude, Netherlands. Behind our questions we found support from [...]
At Experience Integral's Embody Integral Sustainability Conference convenor Anouk Brack very wisely used a Theory U design for the five day discovery process. Theory U process is based on the work of Otto Scharmer and is a multi-stage experience that enables a group to traverse the territory from initiation, to sensing, to presencing, to crystallizing to prototyping. and co-creating. I [...]
EVA Lanxmeer was a destination I was delighted to explore in August while I was in the Netherlands. I went there to visit Peter Merry, Founder of Centre for Human Emergence Netherlands and discover why he had moved to this eco-village. Peter and I walked around EVA Lanxmeer and I recorded his commentary - to [...]
Is information becoming revalued? - so that the more often it is exchanged the more valuable it becomes?? I have been having an interesting conversation with a GenX information packager and distributor. We have been talking about presenters giving away all the presentations from a conference for free. I come from the Boomer generation where we were taught that the scarcity of [...]