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Archive for May, 2012

Principles for Living Intelligently in a Healthy City

Posted in Lifecycle, tagged , , , , , , on May 30, 2012 | 3 Comments »


As the city becomes more complex individuals, organizations, and community systems interconnect and interplay. Life and death and the health of the city are very much reflected in healthy alignment of the many systems that make up the whole city system (or holarchy).

These different scales of city systems co-exist at different stages of their life cycles - new teams are in formative stages like babies, other associations are shifting into their youth, some organizations act like mature adults and yet other sectors carry the weight of elders. We are all members of these many systems simultaneously.  Our city feels alive and thriving when we can learn in constructive ways across the generational lifescapes.

The quality of life in the micro (individual) reflects the quality of life at the meso (teams and organizations) and the macro (communities and city) and vice versa. All these whole systems (holons) must be in service to both self and others and place. That is the essence of a healthy life in a healthy living city.

Evolution biologist, Elisabeth Sahtouris offers 15 Principles of Healthy Living Systems which informed both Integral City intelligences and Integral City Book Chapters [as noted in square brackets] provide powerful guidance for the healthy Human Hive.

Elisabet’s Principles of Living Systems are these:

1. Self-creation or autopoiesis [eco-emergence-living]

2. Complexity or diversity of parts [eco-emergence]

3. Embeddedness in larger holons and dependence on the holarchy  [integral, living]

4. Self reflexivity or autognosis and self-knowledge [integral, Chapters 6 and 8]

5. Self regulation/maintenance or autonomics, balancing efficiency and resilience [integral,

living]

6. Response-ability to internal and external stress or change [integral Chapters 5 to 8]

7. Input/output of matter, energy and information with other holons [living, Chapters 5 and 7]

8. Transformation of matter, energy and information; no non-recyclable waste [ living Chapter

5, 7]

9. Communications among all parts [integral, Chapters 10,11,12]

10. Empowerment, full employment of all component parts [meshworking]

11. Coordination of parts and functions [meshworking]

12. Balance of interests negotiated among parts, whole and embedding holarchy [living]

13. Reciprocity of parts in mutual contribution and assistance [living]

14. Conservation of what works well [integral]

15. Innovation, creative change of what does not work well [inquiry]

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Listen to Elisabet Sahtouris at the upcoming eLaboratory.

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.

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Living Intelligence Renews City Value Proposition

Posted in A. Contexting Intelligences, B. Individual Intelligences, C. Collective Intelligences, Lifecycle, tagged , , , , , , , on May 24, 2012 |


Living intelligence relates to the aliveness of each citizen through each of their lifecycle stages and the aliveness of the city through its lifecycle stages.

These interlocking lifecycles are powerful fractal relationships that impact how each person, organization and community contribute to the wellbeing of the city. At each of these scales we go through lifecycle stages equivalent to birth, childhood, youth, young adult, mature adult, and elder.

Likewise the city itself passes through these cycles of life – not once but repeatedly over eons depending on the history and age of the city. For example think how Paris has redefined itself as a city throughout economic ages defined in terms of agricultural, artisinal, empire, industrial, knowledge and network contexts. Each era has progressed through its own lifecycle stages and the city has renewed itself and its purpose for supporting life that serves local, regional, continental and world interests.

Living intelligence asks how can we align and optimize the life of people in the city at each stage of life? How can we align and optimize the lifecycle stage of the city with the lifecyle drivers of individuals, organizations, communities and planet?

Living intelligence asks:

1. How vibrant is the health of this city? What do we notice about the vitality of individuals and all the collectives in the city surviving in an integral way? How are they sustaining themselves bio-physically /psychologically /culturally /socially ? Where is the edge of awareness about how the city connects in a sustainable way with its environment?

2. What is the city’s unique value contribution locally and globally? How does the city add value to the eco-region and/or the global flow of resources and vice versa? How does the city replenish the life conditions that support its life?

3. Where is the city’s juice for creating renewal? How are individuals and all the collectives in the city considering the wellbeing of tomorrow’s city unto the 7th generation? How are individuals and all the collectives in the city regenerating their own lives in an integral way? Where are the processes and plans for succession that support people bio-physically /psychologically /culturally /socially ?

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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.

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Emergent Intelligence Frames Whole System Design

Posted in Building - Structures, Emergence, tagged , , , , , , on May 22, 2012 | 1 Comment »


Emergent Intelligence helps us not only see the city as  a whole but to design it as a whole. This gives us a chance to tap into our human hive mind – a mind that transcends and includes our individual minds. This condition arises because each person is massively interdependent on a living collective system in which he or she is embedded.

Where am I seeing evidence that this is emerging in cities? New discoveries like human generated energy  and new building designs that are energy neutral or even energy generating such as we see in Cradle to Cradle certification or where we are changing how we even think about designing energy effective buildings.

Such developments are signficant because, as a dissipative structure the city sucks in resources from its environment and spews out products, by-products and waste to its environment. That is why, when we take into consideration all the cities of the world (where now more than 50% of humanity live), their functioning affects the lives of all people regardless of where they live, inside or outside the city.

If city designers and developers can see the city as if it were a whole system, they may be able to appreciate its embedded wisdom for surviving in its unique life conditions; the mystery of its collective life force; and the tremendous potential it embraces in the energy, information and matter that it embraces. Seeing the city as a whole helps us to truly appreciate the performance of its sub-systems and gives us the context in which we can understand and flow with emergence.

Now What?  Here are three simple rules (principles) for applying Integral City Emergent Intelligences:

1. Survive so all living systems (holons) serve each other’s existence.

2. Adapt all city functions to flow in a closed loop of resource exchange with the environment.

3. Create a self-regenerating feedback loop, by interconnecting human regeneration cycles so that they honour the contributions of each stage of life as they replenish the environment.

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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.

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Emergent Designers Seek Energetic City 2050 for Arnhem

Posted in Building - Structures, Emergence, H. Research, Inquiry, Integral Maps, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on May 10, 2012 | 3 Comments »


Emergent Intelligence in the city enables survival, adaptation and regeneration of the whole human system.  Last week I was exploring how designers apply Emergent Intelligence in Arnhem, NL working with Alliander and Freedom Lab to explore Energetic City 2050.

Over the next six months, three teams are exploring how people in the city could generate their own power. Each with their own manifestos, and with a diversity of approaches, Innergy, Markt and Netwerk will explore energy, regenerativity and energetics apparently from all four quadrants of the Integral City.

As designers, in the Human Hive, I am curious to see how they will explore regeneration as it occurs through biological reproduction and inner renewal, shared learning and teaching and coaching others in roles, competencies and capacities? Will self-organizing energy production enable new forms of renewal as the city, like all living systems, will develop new cyclical habits that enable the accumulation, exploitation, distribution and redeployment of resources (the four stages of resilience identified by Gunderson and Holling et al)?

While Arnhem is set in the verdant food production area of eastern Netherlands, by shifting energy sources, how will emergence (a characteristic of living systems), arise from the resonance and coherence of the city system with its agricultural environment? How will the teams design resonance to emerge as the new city systems align externally to the city’s environment? Will they find new ways for the city to literally resonate with its surroundings? With the imaginations of artists, engineers, architects, social workers and IT designers, I am anticipating some surprising emergences and coherences will arise from the realignment of all the elements of the city system so that energy can be optimized. And when both resonance and coherence become synchronized what new capacities may emerge in the city system?

I am excited to see what new capacities for sustainability may emerge as a newly energized city invents new ways to embrace order, strategic planning, caring and sharing and systemizing.

This Experiment is an Inspiring Route to Liberating City Design! Before I left the first (of four) Energetic City 2050 Intensive, I could see the teams were already operating as if the city was not a system of parts, but a whole system of the human species (essentially an ecology of whole-parts or holons). Thus as they explored designs for a system of wholes, the city’s holarchy of  communities, organizations, groups, families and individuals and the built environment were going to open up to whole new potentials.

Kudos to the imaginations behind this daring experiment (Karin Rikkers of Alliander, and Alex VanOost especially) – it opens the way for  the healthy functioning of all the holons in one city and demonstrates how emergence can be a whole new learning methodology for other cities to practise.

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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.

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Hello Human Hive: Welcome Emergent World

Posted in climate, Emergence, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on May 8, 2012 |


Emergent Intelligence is the intelligence that drives resilience. This gives the city the qualities of aliveness: it not only survives, but it adapts and regenerates. This intelligence enables the city to emerge as the  bio-psycho-cultural-social behaviors, intentions, relationships and systems of its citizens interact with the environment they co-create as well as the eco-regional environment the city is situated in.

Emergence, like resilience is a phenomenon of complex adaptive systems. If the city were a bee hive,  we could easily see that the hive adapts through differentiation and integration for the purpose of achieving a hive survival goal – to produce the 40 pounds of honey per year that the hive needs to survive. In the bee hive differentiation exists in the definition of work roles that enable the hive to respond to life conditions. These roles are exhibited by its conformity enforcers (who do most of the work), diversity generators (who generate innovation options), resource allocators (who reward performance towards goal achievement), inner judges (who act as a hive mind to integrate all the roles) and intergroup tournaments (where competing hives ensure that the best local practices become species sustainability practices) . These five roles enable resilience because by optimizing the access to energy resources and the use of that energy for food production and infrastructure, they ensure individual survival, organizational sustainability and species resilience.

When we look at the Human Hive it appears that all these roles are in operation, but the key ingredient that is missing at this stage of city evolution is the agreement and focus on the city’s purpose – which would enable the achievement of a goal. Without that purpose, the goal is absent that clarifies why and how people manifest matter, energy and information for food production, infrastructure development and cultural vibrancy.

The question we must ask ourselves in order to mature our species is “what is the equivalent for the Human Hive of the Bee Hive’s 40 pounds of honey”? Perhaps we will be “coerced” into discovering a whole ecology of city purposes by the global crises that face us now? Only by purposefully working together will we solve the great challenges (aka wars) of climate, governance, technology developments and worldviews.

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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.

Read Full Post »

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