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Archive for July, 2012

Structural Intelligence Supports Fulness of Humanity

Posted in Building - Structures, tagged , , , , , , , , , on July 31, 2012 |


Structural (or building) intelligence represents the “ Its” space of the human hive.

This intelligence connects us to the time-space realities of the city, that we see, feel, hear, smell, touch and taste. It gives us the capacity to structure and systematize our environment to sustain our complex adaptive life systems.

City structures are made up both from the collective of people (clusters of social holons and the meta-social holon of all people in the city) of whom we are a part and also the built environment.

The built environment is the extension of our human systems that enables the large population of people in the city to survive in close proximity to one another. The structural systems for managing energy, information and matter are essentially the same as those mapped out for the individual biology (outer intelligences).

These.structures have crystallized evolutionary complexity by capturing the simple but powerful circles of the family and clan hearth; by creating hierarchies of power, merit and production; by embracing inclusive social safety nets; by shifting into complex neural networks; and now encircling the globe through communication and satellite technologies.

Thus structures and infrastructures in the human hive support (or when they are not appropriate, block) sustainability, resilience and the fullness of our humanity.

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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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Storytelling Quickens Cultural Intelligence

Posted in Storytelling - Cultures, tagged , , , , , , , , , on July 26, 2012 |


Last month I visited Leon Mexico where I met the Citizen’s Observatory and together we all met the Mixteca indigenous peoples who have moved to the city. The Mixteca have created their own urban culture (beside the railway tracks) from the strength of the stories they bring from their traditional ways. Their stories of daily life, spiritual practice, making a living, raising children and respecting differences, quickened the way that we thought about making change in the whole city. Much to our surprise this catalyzed co-creativity that supported everything from reviving the city spirit and centre, to transportation, commerce, education and health care.

Stories have a way of linking the subjective and intersubjective realities in the city. They represents the interior realities of individuals and groups of people in the Human Hive. Sharing stories shares experiences that arise from peoples’ objective and interobjective exterior realities. They convey the values and visions of people who co-create all cultural expression in the city.

Taken together, we have four voices in the city who share their perspectives. Every language makes room for these voices by the use of pronouns indicating who is speaking their view: I, We/You, Him/Her, Them. These four perspectives are the voices of the four quadrants of the integral model of the city and the four particular voices of: the Citizen, Civil Society, the City Manager, and City Developer. Each of these voices contributes to the intersubjective discourse of the city.

One of my deepest learnings about stories comes from Barry Lopez,  He says, ” stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes, a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put stories in each other’s memories. That is how how people care for themselves.” (Crow and Weasel)

Following through on the power of storytelling for the wellbeing of the Human Hive, here are three simple rules that can quicken the experience of Integral City Cultural Intelligences:

1. Respect others – appreciate the differences that make a difference.

2. Listen deeply.- cultural communication deepens more quickly with adept listening.

3. Speak your story, and enable others to speak theirs – this co-creates communities of story tellers. As the stories complexify they eventually become stories of integral 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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Responsive Relationships Grow Aliveness in the Human Hive

Posted in C. Collective Intelligences, Storytelling - Cultures, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on July 24, 2012 | 1 Comment »


Relationships may be the prime “currency” of the Integral City. Our interpersonal relationships tell us do we have the capacity to survive together? connect with our environment (including other people)? and reproduce? recreate? regenerate?

In a living system, relationships are the bonds that link identities (holons) and information. Relationships make exchanges possible. The formation of relationships is central to the emergence of new patterns, new intersubjective intelligence and new complexity.

Relationships can be scaled along a spectrum of: simple (transactional), plural (transformational) and complex (transmutational).

  • Our transactional relationships tend to serve our bio-physical behavioral needs.
  • Our transformational relationships tend to serve our intentional needs.
  • Our transmutational relationships catalyze shifts in meeting collective needs of the whole system.

As the culture of the Human Hive expands through the inclusion of more ethnic voices it also deepens through the complexifying of the values that cross-connect families, friends, neighbourhoods, work places, sectors and communities.

As we study the intricacies of these relationships we see that they have fractal qualities.  The relationship-based patterns and processes enable the recalibration of what works in the Human Hive. This creates the rich mesh of multiple cultures that co-creates an ecology of vibrant, responsive relationships that has the capacity to grow consciousness and aliveness in 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.

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Cultural Intelligence Tells the Stories of the City Heart

Posted in Storytelling - Cultures, tagged , , , , , , , on July 20, 2012 |


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 voice; multiple levels of values; and both city cultures and rural cultures.

The voices of Cultural Intelligence tell the stories of the city, creating a heart-beat of the city that resonates to different rhythms, reflects distinctive heart-felt places within the city’s spaces and recalls the histories of the many cultures that now live in our cities.

City cultures depend totally on the quality of relationships. The culture of the city represents the lived values of its citizens. It is the perpetual barometer of “what is important around here”?

How we prioritize those values at home, work, play or in spiritual practise translates into the quality of our relationships and the intelligence that represents the city’s culture.

As our world cities have become more cosmopolitan, many cities now contain all the world’s cultures, belief systems and ethnic relationships within its boundaries. These kinds of “city limits” in fact are very complex and now create potential for unlimited possibilities. This cultural fertility is the seedbed of the Hive Mind that is gradually emerging as a new form of cultural consciousness (and an ever-expanding collective unconscious).

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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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Managing Personal Energy is Act of Leadership

Posted in Outer, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on July 17, 2012 |


Health emerges because the structures we have created sustain us through relatively stable times and life conditions. When these structures have built-in flexibility they are also resilient and create the conditions for an energetic city.

This means that my bio-physical self can respond to the changes in my environment and access to energy, including other people in it. Thus the cycles of that affect me as a living system – accessing resources for nourishment, sustaining life through connecting with my environment and reproducing the evolutionary impulse of our species – continue to occur despite the challenges of change that surround me.

The complex adaptive capacities of my genes, brain and body are the amazing legacy of all my relations who have gone before me. Developing a healthy body/brain can be considered my responsibility to contribute to a healthy city.  Such personal practise on energy management is an act of leadership, modelling an organic paradigm of health that contributes to resilient healthcare systems, in service to the whole population of the city.

Three simple rules for practising Integral City Outer Intelligences for a fully energized city are:

  • Manage personal energy.
  • Seek bio-physical wellbeing for self and others.
  • Nurture healthy leaders.

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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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Senseless City Is Not Sustainable

Posted in Outer, tagged , , , , on July 11, 2012 |


Our senses are our biological evidence gathering mechanisms. They gather the data that stimulate both automatic behavior (like eye blinking, flinching, sneezing, gagging) and intentional behavior. Intentional behavior involves choice and therefore consciousness. A city without intelligence sufficient to its complexity is a city that has lost touch with its senses. A senseless or sense deprived city does not make sense and is ultimately not sustainable.

The sense-based indicators of wellness in biological life, are related to the dynamic balance of all the systems and sub-systems in our dissipative structures. Because, biology co-creates its environment, wellness is a process always in flux.  Individual organisms at all levels keep adjusting their relationships to find what works. Symbiosis is a characteristic of living systems and is fundamental to community and city wellbeing. It is foundational to the sustainability of 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.

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City Demographics Reflect Embodied Intelligence of Human Hive

Posted in Outer, tagged , , , on July 8, 2012 | 1 Comment »


Outer intelligence is the biological “It” space of the citizen — the space where the body acts and behaves. Behaviors demonstrate our inner intelligence in action. Demographics are key determinants of our intentional, cultural and social capacities, because they represent the bodies through which our intentions, cultures and systems are delivered.

If we want to understand the city we must observe citizen behaviors; to understand citizen behaviors we need to understand them as individuals in the context of the many. Life behaviors have their own order of complexity that are represented in our most basic biological needs. The order of the basics — air, water, food, clothing, shelter — represents an evolving sequence of evolutionary needs (and thus an order of complexity), with a recognition that the first items on the list have primacy over all the needs following. Each person needs a definable amount of clean air, water, food, clothing and shelter to survive. Therefore the city must supply to its citizens the amount of the necessities required to sustain its population. Each person or household essentially has a “home” economy that arises because of the need to supply the basics of life to the individual cells in the household body. The only source of those necessities is the environment in which the city sits — a range that now extends from the center of the city to the furthest point around the world.

Demographic data about individuals and groups in the city should enable the governance system to make calculations on how to manage energy and health in 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.

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Sense in the City Summer 2012 – Co-Create the Future of the Human Hive

Posted in Dialogue, F. Training, H. Research, Level 5 Orange, Level 6 Green, Level 7 Yellow, Telecourse, tagged , , , , , on July 5, 2012 |


July Greetings, Integral City-zens and Friends of Integral City  

Today’s Integral City Sparkies for City Co-Creators:

Architect Christopher Alexander is experimenting with the “Phenomenon of Life,” co-designing living worlds where building centers, hulls and space are co-created with the stakeholders and future users of the buildings. He and his team are doing this with everyone from poor Mexican workers, to Japanese university students, to groups of house owners in rural and highly urbanized community settings.

Hamilton, M., 2008, Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive, p.156

How do we design the city so that I, WE, IT and ITS can co-exist in a vibrant way?

 

We invite you to help us co-create the Future of the City conference by taking 10 minutes to complete this survey: https://www.jitsulab.com/197/0065/The Future of the City Survey. Thanks for returning it by July 15.

Below some of the questions that provoke, engage, question and cross connect co-creators of the Future of the Human Hive!!! We are building a huge excitement and momentum as we ask them with everyone we encounter – in person, online, internationally, through the Blog, in Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.   Let us know what are your burning questions for how to co-exist in the city on our planet of cities?

 

What role are cities playing, as 2012 shifts through the longest/shortest days of its year (depending on your location on the planet)?

  • How are cities surviving the turbulence of life everywhere? How do  cities adapt to polarities of shadow and light in constant play?
  • In the shadows, how do cities survive the misery of the Syrian war, the seeming futility of the EU economic tactics, the searing heat in eastern North America or the disappointment of Rio+20?
  • In the light, what are the implications for cities of the discovery of the Higgs-Boson particle (and the promise of deep understanding of dark energy and dark matter)? What does it mean for cities that human lifecycles are extending beyond 100 years?  What are the lessons for cities about the densifying connections emerging from social media that defy all traditional political assumptions in places like Rangoon, Cairo and Montreal?

How does 2012 call forth new paradigms in just about every sphere of knowledge we care to examine?

  • Where is the kiva for the city where new conversations about city wellbeing can engage City-Zens with scientists, artists, designers, practitioners and faith leaders?
  • How can we discover a new paradigm for the city together? How might we co-create new solutions to: the city’s relationship with its eco-region, indigenous peoples and immigrants from the four corners of the globe; the city’s access to and use of energy, water and food; and the maturing of the city’s collective intelligence?

With more than 50% of people living in cities, how are they the seed pods for the human species where intentions, actions, relationships and productive output collide and co-create our collective habitats?

  • What shifts in our thinking are needed to not only track the quantities of all these interactions, but also to notice the quality and complexity of these exchanges?
  • We wonder, if we take the pulse of more than 50% of humanity in city activity, can we track each city’s essential wellbeing? How does each city’s capacity to achieve wellbeing simultaneously become its measure of resilience?
  • How do cities develop new governance to interact sustainably on a planet of cities?

We invite you to become part of the Brain Trust to design an eLaboratory where we can research new capacities for an Integral City. Start by giving us your ideas and suggestions here: https://www.jitsulab.com/197/0065/The Future of the City Survey

 (BTW, If you are interested in volunteering on the team forming to deliver the conference (rewards provided!!) – find out more here: https://www.jitsulab.com/271/0005/Integral%20City%20eLab%20Volunteer%20Application

 

  1. New Integral City Connections & Resources:

 

  • Integral City joined the Energetic City 2050 in Antwerp in April.  Check out how Alliander (with Partners and Freedom Lab facilitation) have challenged three teams to discover how individuals can generate their own energy in 2050. http://www.energeticcity2050.nl/#slide=expeditie (in Dutch)

 

 

  • Integral City has published - Integral Spirituality in the Human Hive –  the “thirteenth” chapter of the book, Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligence for the Human Hive. The new chapter has been published by the German Engineering Journal, Trialog. A pdf is available (with permission) from our Wiki link:   http://www.integralcity.com/wiki.html .  Reference: Hamilton, M. (2012). Integral Spirituality in the Human Hive: A Primer. Trialog, 2010(4), 10-17.

 

2. 2012 Learning Events:

  1. Dr. Don Beck delivers THE MOMENTOUS LEAP in Dallas-Forth Worth Texas September 6-9, 2012. Join him for Spiral Dynamics in Action:Deciphering the Master Code in the Age of Complexity, Collaboration and Emergence. A Functional, Integral Pathway to a Sustainable Future For details and registration click here: 13th Annual SDi Confab
  2. Join us at the October – December, 2012 for EMBODY INTEGRAL SUSTAINABILITY Conference sponsored by Experience Integral in the Netherlands. We are honoured to be part of an extraordinary international faculty leading change-makers and practitioners in the field of SUSTAINABILITY LEADERSHIP. The three month long intensive program is customized to meet personal and organization needs, blending group learning and individualized support. Find out details here: http://www.experienceintegral.org/cl4s

 

3. Marilyn Blogs about Integral City Intelligences through the framework of What, So What, Now What . As a prologue to the September 2012 eLaboratory, check out all our eLaboratory Blogs here http://www.integralcitycollective.com . These are the topics we’ve covered:

Ecosphere Intel Vital to Planet of Cities

  • Designing Ecosphere Economies for Planet of Cities
  • Earth Day: Let’s Celebrate Ecosphere Intelligence Arising in Planet’s Fortune100!!

Hello Human Hive: Welcome Emergent World

  • Emergent Designers Seek Energetic City 2050 for Arnhem
  • Emergent Intelligence Frames Whole System Design

Living Intelligence Renews City Value Proposition

  • Principles for Living Intelligently in a Healthy City
  • Living Intelligence – Are You the Center of Aliveness in Your City?

Integral Intelligence Reveals Whole City Vitality

  • Connect City-Eco-Regional Holarchy: Improve Health
  • Integral Intelligence – Psycho-Activates Gaia’s Reflective Organ

Inner Intelligence – The Reflective “I” Power of the Human Hive

  • Cherry Blossom Happiness Factor of City-Centric Inner Intelligence
  • Inner Intelligence is Seedbed of City’s Intuition, Insight, Innovation

…meshful blessings for this season of Co-Creating Futures for the Human Hive … 

 Marilyn

Useful Links:

www.integralcity.com ; Vimeo Interviews on the Integral City   “What is an Integral City?”Twitter: integralcity ; Integral City Blog  - read new articles, archives and Sense in the City archives

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Inner Intelligence is Seedbed of City’s Intuition, Insight, Innovation

Posted in Inner, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 3, 2012 | 2 Comments »


Inner intelligence is the “I” space of each citizen. At the scale of the individual I am (virtually) the city’s mind from which emerges the city’s cognitive, emotional and cultural capacities. This “I” is capable of reflection and learning – not just once – not just in a linear way – but through the many loop-de-loops of multi-track learning.

The Inner Intelligences each of us brings to the city are multiple and multiply each other like infinite reflective mirrors. Each “I” in the city is a holon in a nest of holons, interacting in self-organizing, self-exploratory impulses as well as reinforcing learned structures. This makes the “I” of the city both resilient and sustainable – able to adapt and survive as change happens within us.

The Inner Intelligences of my human condition give me a sense of subjective wellbeing in the city through ”my” unique experience as an individual. This Inner Intelligence is precious – it is my learning zone – the source of my leadership -  and I need to care for it as a generative seedbed of my city’s capacity for intuition, insight and innovation. These seeds of the city’s resilience and even its uniqueness, deserve tending with a gardener’s care. I seek a species wisdom to develop a city-centric and eco-regional sensitivity for the care and feeding of these Inner Intelligences. My attention to this seedbed of intention is the source of city development, maturity and probably its survival.

Three simple rules for nurturing my Integral City Inner Intelligences might be:

  • Show up and be self-aware, present, mindful.
  • Notice the city intelligences and map them integrally.
  • Grow leadership in heart, mind, soul.

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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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