Professor of Cities, Richard Florida has reconsidered the consequences of cities pursuing the creative class as a desirable strategy for their success (subject of his book The Rise of the Creative Class). In his new book The New Urban Crisis: How our Cities are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class – [...]
This newsletter is published quarterly using a cycle of perspectives on the Integral City viewed from: Planet, People, Place and Power. The theme of this issue is People. Human social structures create energetic fields whose effects can be measured. At the moment, those measures are rather primitive—for example, we can measure the [...]
18 years ago, I read Ken Wilber’s Sex, Ecology & Spirituality, which introduced me to the Integral model. This book changed my life. In the short term, it provided a unifying framework that enabled me to make sense of the data in my dissertation that was focused on: learning and leadership in self-organizing online [...]
After reading Scale by Geoffrey West, I am deeply impressed by his research, even though it appears that I have some fundamental disagreement with some of his conclusions. West argues for a framework of scaling cities (and other complex adaptive systems) that includes four core properties. His treatise is to my sensibilities so [...]
I have been following the work of Geoffrey West through the scholarly articles that have been sent my way, by Integral City readers who could see the application of his research to the frameworks, patterns and dynamics I had described in Book 1, (Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive) and applied in [...]
Finally, a book on the science of cities!! Geoffrey West’s Scale explains the universal laws that govern cities and how growth, innovation, sustainability, companies and economies contribute to the patterns of city dynamics. Every couple of years a new book is published that corroborates key tenets that Integral City has framed for cities [...]
Go listen to Geoffrey West - there he is again! My friends and colleagues say go to hear his talk on Why Cities Keep Growing. When more than three people recommend a site to me, then I sit up and take notice. In this case I am happy to say that I followed the link [...]