Integral City Meshworks: The Blog

An Integral City is a complex adaptive human system that concentrates habitat for humans like a bee hive does for bees.

As a natural system it faces all the same issues, factors and challenges that affect the concentration of life anywhere: sustaining flows of information, matter and energy for the survival of human life. Serving these three major systems, an Integral City has the same integrative sub-systems identified by Miller’s trans-scale research that show up in six levels of hierarchical complexity from cell to organ to individual to team to organization to society to city-state.

The Human Hive image is a way to see the city as a whole system where the resilience cycle (of Holling et al) emerges  through the living system in the four stages of conservation, breakdown, re-distribution and exploitation. This happens because the four key roles of people in the city system respond to life conditions by shifting the strength of their influences for survival, linking to the environment and generativity/reproduction.  One way to define these roles is that of: conformity enforcers, diversity generators, resource allocators and inner judges.

The value-added of the bee hive is that it serves a double sustainability loop ensuring resilience for the bees and the plants and trees they pollinate in the fields and forests (aka eco-region)  from which the hive renews itself year after year. (And incidentally produces $90bb worth of agricultural for humans.)

The value-added of the Human Hive would be the same on a city eco-regional scale (and eventually global scale) where we would serve a double sustainability loop ensuring resilience for humans and wellbeing for the eco-region/system from which the Human Hive renews itself.

How we could accomplish this would be to use the 12 intelligences that we already have evolved.