Integral City Meshworks: The Blog

Integral Cities in different locations must adapt differing solutions to the same infrastructure problems.  We need to evolve our internal environments and design our external environments in ways that honour the ecosphere that we are inextricably a part of . Only by doing so can both individual and collective human life optimize the amazing diversity our DNA has gifted us with and the deep resilience of the natural ecology Gaia supports us with.

Each city location provides a unique combination of matter, energy and information as the resources of its eco-region. This means over time, humans must discover, develop and design appropriate technological solutions for city metabolism that align with each distinctive environment.

Designing from local resources enables cities to innovate from natural capital and build both diversity and resilience into its food and energy security systems.  This is the principle that Lester Brown has used in developing the designs for Plan B through the Earth Policy Institute, planning sustainable futures with a roadmap of how to get from here to there.  Brown says that, “Plan B is a plan to replace the fossil-fuel-based, automobile-centered, throwaway economy with a new economic model. Instead of being based on fossil fuels, a Plan B economy will be powered by abundant sources of renewable energy: wind, solar, geothermal, hydropower, and biofuels.”

Likewise Graeme Taylor has examined Evolution’s Edge, identifying the core stresses and threats that our planet of cities imposes on the ecosphere. Graeme and his colleagues base designs for Best Futures on the principles embedded in natural design. Taylor observes, “positive outcomes are … possible. Sustainable values, theories, technologies and social organizations are emerging. These are networking together and beginning to develop post-industrial societal structures and economic processes. Humanity has the potential to transform the existing unsustainable system into a sustainable system.”

Integral City designers naturally honour the ecosphere,  enabling sustainability for the Human Hive and resilience for human systems as “reflective organs” in their eco-regions and the full ecology of planet Earth.  Design based on ecosphere intelligence is fundamental to creating the “motherboard” of an integral operating systems for the Human Hive.

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This blog is a prologue to the Integral City webinar conference  City 2.0 Co-Creating the Future of the Human Hive . We are inventing a new operating system for the city.  Click to get more details re the Free Expo and eLaboratory membership  scheduled September 4-27  2012. You are invited to attend and participate.