How do you optimize the impact of Integral City impact by getting our work out to the world?

Integral City AQAL

That is the next question that Roger Walsh asked at IEC.

First consider how important integral ideas are at this time in the world.

The city is the most complex system created by humans – and as such it is subject to information overload. Information overload has the tendency to make life very complicated. This causes and amplifies the stress that we feel at every scale in the city – as individuals trying to do our work, as families trying to stay connected, as teams in our work places trying to produce results, as organizations trying to stay on mission, as sectors trying to meet growing demands, as communities trying to engage neighbourhoods, as the whole city, trying to gain an overview of all this complexity to optimize our quality of life, cultural wellbeing, economic prosperity and infrastructural operation .

The value of thinking about the city using an Integral framework – one that can be negotiated with a compass and four maps –  is that it brings alignment and coherence to the many parts of the city. Our Integral City Compass shape shifts into 4 City Maps that help us to situate the dynamics and the patterns that too often elude us with information overload.

The Integral City framework helps us make sense of the cross-currents of our city lives from four directions:

1. how do the winds of change impact us as individuals? (Map 1 and Map 4).

2. how do the conflicts of relationships impact us in our social holons or collectives? (Maps 2, 3, 4)

3. how does the internal environment of Self and Others impact our awareness, beliefs and intentions? (Maps 1, 2 and 3.

4. how does the external environment of Place and Structure impact our actions, performance and capacity to manifest? (Maps 3 and 4).

With the situational guidance offered by compass and maps, Integral City can then support the unfolding of the intelligences that emerge as we optimize our interactions from the four quadrants of the city.