A series of articles on China’s empty cities triggers a series of Integral City thought capsules and thought experiments. China Ghost City , Photographed by Caemmerer According to a Wired article, China has built 100's of cities to house millions of people over the next 20 years. Today they stand empty. No people in [...]
Paris, San Bernardino, Brussels, Ferguson, Nice, Orlando, Dallas, Lahore, Baton Rouge, Istanbul. The world’s cities seem threatened from within and without. When Integral City sponsored the Online Webinar 2012, we learned the five major threats that all cities faced were: climate, energy, water, food and finance. Since then we have added a sixth threat that [...]
Je Suis Charlie may be the most potent vaccine for an Ebola of the Human Soul that has been eating away the flesh of the human psyche since the first acts of terror were shouted in the name of Allahu Akbar. God is Great. God is Good. But the God [...]
This is a re-publication of an article by Keith Rice, published in Eros and Kosmos, August, 2014. It offers an explanation of the Contexting and Strategic Intelligences that lie behind the article I wrote on City Trigger Points, Country Tipping Points also published in Eros and Kosmos. Eugene Pustoshkin, Editor of Eros and Kosmos (the only [...]
Systems thinking is fundamental to understanding systems. So to understand systems, let's start with exploring, what are systems? (1) Systems are evolutionary structures. They are characterized by boundaries that contain system elements. Those elements have evolved across deep time, from the Big Bang until now. The basic evolutionary strata that we can point to on [...]
Cultural intelligence represents the “We” life of the city. It is the beating heart of the Human Hive. This heart-based intelligence embraces the relationships in the city. These relationships transcend boundaries that both contain and separate families, groups, organizations and all the collectives of people in the city. It includes the individual and the group [...]
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 [...]
Civil Society #occupies the We and Heart of the Integral City. As Civil Society We beat with the pulse of cooperatives, credit unions, foundations, institutes, not-for-profits, NGO's, social enterprises and other agencies who invest in cultural and social capital in our Integral City. As Civil Society Members and Activists our volunteers #occupy principles of city wellbeing. As Civil Society Executive Directors [...]
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 [...]
Events in Egypt this last week show how the consciousness of people in the rural area that serves cities can ignite a whole culture. The amazing pictures of hundreds of thousands marching in Cairo and the Mubarak government's progressive retreat in the face of the population's fearless demands mark what the media call a "regime change". [...]