STOCKHOLM, March 28, 2011 − The South Korean district Songpa wins the Globe Sustainable City Award 2011 for excellent sustainable urban development. The Globe Sustainable City Award is now presented for the third year. The aim of the City Award is to recognize cities and municipalities, which excel in sustainable, urban development, and to set a [...]
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 We wonder whether and how autocracies in these places may be superseded by autocracy, theocracy or even democracy?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 [...]
At Royal Roads University, the inaugural Sustainable Community Development (SCD) cohort has just completed their first Potentials for Adaptive Change Residency on RRU Campus. In the first week of February, after three weeks online, a cohort, with professions as varied as municipal forester, downtown revitalization director, tourism instructor and sustainability officer, whose members come from [...]
Further to my blog from Feb. 23, the National Post runs a most informative analysis by Chip Pitts of Stanford Law School and National Post's Aileen Donnelly entitled Ripe for Revolt? Who Might Fall. Their analysis not only takes into account the internet users, but also cell phones in the countries of North Africa and [...]
Some years ago I heard Lynne Twist talk about "changing the dream of the North". It was an invocation given to her by the Achuar people of the upper Amazon. When I heard this story, it made my spine tingle as I grokked that this intention had powers to embrace my own work. These last few [...]
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 [...]
Further to my interview with Will Varey in Perth about emergence in the city (also see Blog) we talked about the dilemma that in one location we have multiple cities. Effectively each citizen carries around a unique mental model of the city and through the magic of self-organizing systems we negotiate this complex territory. The [...]
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 [...]