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Posts Tagged ‘Principles’

Decoding Integral City Maps; Cohering the Source of Patterns

Posted in E. Evolutionary Intelligences, Integral Maps, Master Intelligence, Spiritual intelligence, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 3, 2013 | 1 Comment »


The Key to decoding  the Integral City Maps is the Master Code:

  • Take Care of Yourself
  • Take Care of Each Other
  • Take Care of this Place
  • Take Care of this Planet

Evolutionary Intelligences

This Key is symbolized with the Integral City Compass which decodes the 12 Intelligences we need to explore Integral City Maps with ever-increasing circles of care.

Each of the five Maps for the Integral City, gives the Map Reader a different territory to explore. Because all the territories are interconnected, the Maps shape-shift from one form to another, leading the Reader through a labyrinth of city patterns, that taken together with the Master Code Compass, cohere into a whole.

City explorers who have taken journeys with the Principles of Living Systems and/or the language of PatternDynamics(TM) start to notice that Integral City Maps and Intelligences belong to this cluster of systems that decode patterns of life.

In the last six blogs, we have explored the language of PatternDynamics(PD) in order to translate its symbols into the language of Integral City Maps. In many ways we could say PD provides six archways (marked by a PD symbol) to the different territories of the city.

In this last blog (of this PD series) we enter the archway to the heart of the city – it’s Source.  Here we recognize the territory of City Spirit which we explored in Map 5.

The Source Pattern is foundational to all the other patterns, emerging from evolutionary consciousness: order, identity and purpose.

PatternDynamics Patterns

Like the other PD patterns, the Source Pattern has seven qualities, but as a meta-meta-pattern each of these qualities derives from a marriage of Source with the other 6 PD meta-patterns plus Source itself.

Energy: The Energy Pattern emerges from the conjunction of Source with Rhythm. The Energy Pattern is foundational to the city’s many ways of moving, expressing and evolving. It is evident in the exchanges of Map 3 and the involutionary, evolutionary cycle of Map 5. Energy appears as first cause for the Evolutionary, Integral and Living Intelligences and Emergent result in the experience of Love.

Resource: The Resource pattern is the child of Source and Polarity. In Map 5 Resource is the centre of the city’s Grace, Place and Space and the emergent quality of core values, Beauty, Goodness and Truth. The Resource Pattern reminds us that the city as Gaia’s Reflective Organ adds value to our planet’s evolutionary journey.

Transformity: The Transformity emerges naturally when Source inspires Structure. It is clearly the pattern of Map 4′s spiral of complex organizational structures.  Transfomity is a source of hope, reminding us that evolution has been experimenting with 14 billion years of complex transformations, to which human systems, including the city, belong.

Power: The Power Pattern, emanating from the collision of Source and Exchange, represents  the Big Bang on Earth. As such it lies in the centre of Map 1 and drives the “prime directive” behind all the cycles in all the other Maps. While Energy is multi-directional, Power is multi-cyclical with a central purpose or centered focus (like the beehive’s 40 pounds of honey). The Power Pattern of the Integral City will eventually produce the city’s purpose. And when 10% of Gaia’s cities discover and start to live into their purpose, we will have a Planet of Cities in service to all life on Earth.

Autopoeisis: The Autopoeisis Pattern “makes itself” from combining Source with Creativity. Building on Transformity and Power, Self-making that is adaptive drives the emergence of the nested holarchy of city systems in Map 2, the emergent capacities in Map 3 and the increased complexity of organizations in Map 4. This pattern recognizes how the city as a human system is constantly making and re-making itself through the grand cycles of Spiritual Sourcing and Re-Sourcing in Map 5.

Pattern: The Pattern Pattern is Source’s grand Dynamic Dance with itself on the Universe’s dance floor.  We notice the choreography of patterns in each of Integral City’s Maps. Tracing the Patterns reinforces our appreciation of the miracle that “we get order for free” (1). The PD Book of Patterns, records how Life has chosen to repeat its most productive Patterns at every level of scale in the human systems of the city.

Void: The Void Pattern is Source reflecting on Source. As Source we discover this empty fullness through our meditations, contemplations and other spiritual practices that remind us that we have all evolved from the same Source and will return to the same Source. There is nowhere else to go. Map 5 is a “busy expression” of discovering the Void Pattern in the centre of our Fields of Coherence.

Decoding Integral City Maps, is as simple as accessing the Void through the Source of Source.  And as we practise living with the Patterns of Aliveness that dynamically run through the territories of our bio-psycho-cultural-social lives in the Integral City, we expand our Practise of the Master Code, so that we can evolve to be stewards of a fully conscious, sustainable and resilient Planet of Cities.

Reference:

1. Kauffman, S. A. (1993). The Origins of Order:  Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution. New York: Oxford Press.

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Systems Patterns – a Language for Living

Posted in Integral Maps, Lifecycle, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 5, 2013 | 9 Comments »


The patterns embedded in human systems have evolved for hundreds of thousands of years.

PatternDynamics Patterns

Indeed, as living systems, the patterns have emerged from the 4 billion years that Life has vibrated on the dance floor of the Planet, as single cell microbes to  multi-organ persons. These patterns emerge from expressing the simple rules (or principles) that make systems alive.

These principles were explored by many of the Visionaries at the Integral City 2.0 Online Conference (IC2OC)- Elisabet Sahtouris in speaking of the 16 Principles of Living Systems; Mark DeKay in exploring his interpretation of Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language; Hazel Henderson in proposing Biomimicry principles for investment; and of course the 12 Intelligences that inspire Integral City’s ongoing inquiry.

Tim Winton, another Visionary of the ongoing IC2OC conference came to the west coast of North America last week – bringing his training on the language of Pattern Dynamics(TM) outside of Australia for the first time. I was privileged to attend Tim’s one day workshop in Vancouver, Canada.

As author of Pattern Dynamics(TM), Tim has created a Pattern Language that is especially enlightening for organizations to notice the patterns that govern organizational life. Coming from a background in forestry and applied life sciences, Tim has developed his systems language from his decades of observing the interaction of the A-B-C systems of life. His own career has created the learning habitat where an elegant Pattern Language has emerged  from Tim’s observations of the Biological and Cosmospherical systems of forest ecologies.  And from this set of symbols he now offers a technology to empower Anthropocentric systems at the organizational level.

Tim’s Pattern Dynamics(TM) language is easy to learn and powerful to apply especially for discovering insights about sustainability and resilience. Pattern Dynamics(TM) uses a basic set of seven patterns (as pictured above) that enable a dynamic exploration in nature and culture of:

Rhythm: the temporal aspects in systems

>Polarity: the interplay of opposites in systems

 >>Structure: the enduring frameworks of systems

 >>>Exchange: the productive capacity of systems

>>>>Creativity: the emergence of novel adaptation of systems

>>>>>Dynamics: the process that coordinates dynamics of systems

>>>>>>>Source: the consciousness of the origin of identity and purpose in systems

These seven primary patterns can be cross-referenced to create a full set of 49 secondary patterns. A visit to PatternDynamics(TM) website will show you how they create an integrated set of patterns to produce a very versatile language for organizational explorations of the dynamical relationships of cultures (internal and external), economies, sustainability and innovation.

Since the workshop, I have been considering how Pattern Dynamics(TM)(PD) offers a complementary language for organizational development in the context of cities.  Like fractals, the PD patterns are essentially embedded at organizational scale, in the patterns that are foundational to the framework of Integral City at city scale.

At the city scale, the patterns that I have explored in the Integral City book, website, articles, conference, blog and trainings  have been derived from the five Maps of the City.

Four of these maps are presented in the book, (and recently discussed with Ken Wilber) and the fifth in a recent article. I will explore each of them in subsequent blogs but here is how I see them relating to Winton’s Pattern Dynamics(TM) .

Map 1: The Four Quadrant Eight Level Map of Reality - this relates to PD Polarity Patterns

Map 2: The Nested Holarchy of City Systems – this relates to PD Creativity Patterns

Map 3: The Scalar Fractal Relationship of Micro-Meso-Macro Human Systems – this relates to PD Exchange Patterns

Map 4: The Complex Adaptive Structures of Change – this relates to PD Structure Patterns

Map 5: Spirituality in the Human Hive – this relates to PD Source Patterns

Tim’s recent interview with the IC2OC  inspired me to explore his Pattern Dynamics(TM) language further. I am so delighted to have received instruction from the Pattern Dynamics(TM) Language creator himself – and can recommend his integrally informed teaching style to anyone trying to understand how organizations as living systems speak a pattern language that reveals their energy, functionality and their evolutionary wellbeing.

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Integral City Systems of Survival: Why Not Just Privatize the Government?

Posted in C. Collective Intelligences, E. Evolutionary Intelligences, Lifecycle, Navigating - IVSM, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 24, 2012 | 1 Comment »


Why Not Just Privatize the Government?

Why not privatize city government? Jane Jacobs described two moral syndromes necessary for a human social system to survive – one called Guardian and the other called Commercial. She argued that mixing their ethics created “monstrous hybrids” that were immoral and subversive to life. Reframing these syndromes from an integral perspective, allows the retention of the collective dignities of purple and blue in the Guardian syndrome to be re-aligned with the innovation dignities of red and orange in the Commercial syndrome, while avoiding the unhealthy misappropriation of the disasters inherent in Jacobs’ moral codes. This transcendence and inclusion in evolutionary social systems requires commitment to a purpose-driven, planet-centric set of life-giving principles (captured in the Integral City’s 12 Evolutionary Intelligences and Elisabet Sahtouris’ 15 principles of living systems). Essentially when the health of all the holarchies in the city (and the planet of cities) is contexted with the health of all living systems, a superordinate goal for city governance emerges. Integrally informed organizing practices like Holacracy, Biomimicry Investment Codes and Almere City Principles are all experiments that demonstrate how healthy hybrids based on life-giving principles are emerging in human systems. They suggest ways to develop integrally-informed city governance that avoids monstrous hybrids because they are based on evolutionary life-principles, as requisite levels of complexity for survival.

This is an Abstract from a longer article for the Integral Post. The complete article is available here: http://integrallife.com/integral-post/integral-city-systems-survival#comment-5040

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Power of WE3 on our Planet of Cities: an MR-WE Scan

Posted in Master Intelligence, tagged , , , , , , , on October 15, 2012 | 8 Comments »


Blog Action Day! The Power of WE!

What and how did we discover the Power of WE in the recent Integral City 2.0 Online Conference?

Without the many WE’s in our conference, we could never have emerged the insights to create a new operating system for the Human Hive. But with the power of WE times 3, here is a “peep show” of what is emerging.

1.      ACTION RESEARCH DESIGN WE

We launched a month-long Action Research Inquiry about how the 12 Intelligences of an Integral City could help us develop a new operating system for the city.

Each intelligence had three WE’s as presenters who spoke for the value of a particular intelligence to the city. Thought Leaders explored with us What the intelligence is? Designers framed for us So What is important about incorporating this intelligence into city life? And Practitioners told us Now What can we do to implement this intelligence in service to the wellbeing of the Human Hive?

2.      PRODUCER WE

We used a methodology that was built on the DNA of the Master Code for the Human Hive:

  • Take Care of Self
  • Take Care of Each Other
  • Take Care of This Place

3.      CITY VOICES WE

It was critical to hear from as many voices in the city as we could attract. When participants registered we asked them to identify what voice of the city they most identified with:

  1. Citizens
  2. Civil Society
  3. City Government/Institutions
  4. Business

POWER OF WE3

The power of these three WE’s produced an exponential learning blast. This explosion of WE power is still circling the earth like volcanic emissions. You could say the effect has made our sunrises brighter and our sunsets awesomely colourful! This kind of blast casts a radically optimistic outfall of evolutionary patterns across our city grid.

We realize we can no longer use a simple/single MRI scan to understand our beloved Human Hive. To grasp the power of our discoveries, we need an MR-WE scan.

Two beautiful protocols have emerged. One (from George Por) gives us a personal practice to live the Master Code as a set of principles for evolutionary expansion.

The other (from Alia Aurami) unpacks the trajectory of the Master Code across the developmental span of the human system.

Below in Table 1, is just a little sampling of how the power of WE3 intelligences are being released when City Voices intersect with the three DNA strands of our Master Code, on our Integral City Intelligences MR-WE-scan. (You can find out more details by visiting the website www.integralcitycollective.com. Registration is free.).

Discover how the Power of WE3 releases the DNA of our Master Code in communities, capitals and capacities in all the cities on our Planet of Cities. Join us in our ongoing inquiry at the Integral City 2.0 Online Conference.

 

Table1: Releasing the Power of WE3

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Thanksgivings and Question-Harvests in the Human Hive

Posted in E. Evolutionary Intelligences, A. Contexting Intelligences, B. Individual Intelligences, C. Collective Intelligences, D. Strategic Intelligences, Master Intelligence, city, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 10, 2012 | 2 Comments »


Ten days after the final Integral City 2.0 Online Conference (IC2OC) … and we have celebrated our first Thanksgiving (whose timing we borrow from Canada :-) )

We are thankful for the people who made the IC2OC possible: all the volunteers, the speakers, the affiliates and the participants – in a constantly
intermeshing order.

We have an inventory of harvest outcomes that is almost overwhelming in its plenitude: products like 50 mp3 recordings; 36 pdf transcripts of
interviews (in various stages of completion); daily harvest summaries; website postings from participants; conference member profiles; weekly harvest paintings; music; video; social media and more to come.

We are grateful for all the relationships we discovered – not only with individuals, but with affiliates, partners and suppliers to name a few.

We are awed by the complex learning and research processes we created to produce the eLaboratory and Live Event phase of IC2OC.

And now we are harvesting a process that took 36 months to produce 36 Live Event sessions. We are noticing natural patterns emerging as we
immerse ourselves in a sea of amazing data about the Human Hive.

These I pose now simply as research questions, that we will be exploring as we gather, store, appreciate and re-purpose the Harvest in service to our Planet and her Cities.

  • What have we learned about designing a new operating system for the city on a Planet of Cities?
  • How is the new paradigm of the city integrally based on the Principles of Life?
  • How do those principles of sustainability and resilience emerge from Energy, Matter and Information?
  • What are the protocols of behaviour, thought, relationship and systems that we need in our cities on a Planet of Cities?
  • What is the new story of the city on a Planet of Cities?
  • What are the life-giving practices for individuals and communities in our cities?
  • How do we source and re-source Life in our cities for our planet?
  • What is the relationship of City Spirit to the new operating for this city on a Planet of Cities?
  • What have we come to understand about how the Master Code impacted our inquiry, our processes, our conference?

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What Makes a Good Question?

Posted in D. Strategic Intelligences, Inquiry, tagged , , , , on August 10, 2012 |


Effective and authentic inquiry is often a process that we need to relearn many times.

What makes a good question?  The kinds of questions we want to ask for generative inquiry have the qualities of being:

  • Personal (Tell us a time when you experience an emotional response to your neighbourhood?)
  • Open (Start the question with What, Why, Where, How, When, Who?)
  • Appreciative (Framed to draw on the positive)

How to ask good open ended questions that invite genuine input is an art. Einstein suggested that a powerful question is many times more powerful than a ready answer. Staying in the question long enough can help us get beyond where we are stuck and lead to real breakthroughs!!

Three simple rules (or principles) for applying Integral City Inquiry Intelligences might be these:

  1. Ask what’s working (and not) and co-generate a vision for the city’s contribution to the planet.
  2. Frame your questions to create an integral city and community plan.
  3. Keep asking “who else should be here?” when implementing and managing the city plan appropriately at all scales in the city.

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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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Structural Intelligence Impacts Energy for All

Posted in Building - Structures, tagged , , , , , , , , on August 7, 2012 |


Structural Intelligences arise from the collective of living holons of which each of us is a part, as well as the structures and infrastructures our Human Hives create to sustain that life.

These structures are now embodied in our economics, energy systems, communications technology, city public works, and social organizations. As such these structural intelligences are co-creating new environments both inside the city and outside in its eco-region. Our Human Hives are effectively centred around human activity and create centres of human activity that ripple out from our homes through our neighbourhoods, communities, cities and eco-regions to the farthest points on the planet.

Recognizing that these structures and infrastructures now connect in trans-planetary networks (that consume more energy than any other human artefact and contribute to the climate change equation) demands that we take a global responsibility about our local structures.

Three simple rules for applying Integral City Structural Intelligences for healthy cities and eco-regions are:

1. Manage life sustaining energy for all life.

2. Design from the center, at all scales for all holons.

3. Build structures that integrate self-organizing creativity with hierarchies of order.

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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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Connect City-Eco-Regional Holarchy: Improve Health

Posted in Integral Maps, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 12, 2012 | 1 Comment »


The four quadrant perspectival map of reality (bio-psycho-cultural-social) can be shape-shifted into a nested holarchy of city holons.

This scalar fractal map shows the relationship amongst the micro, meso and macro human systems at multiple levels of scale from the individual to the family/group, organization, sector, community, city, eco-region and the world. Integral intelligence looks at the city, as a whole system, in the context of its eco-region. So we can see cities in their natural environment (whether that be mountain, sea, prairie, desert, lakeland or any of the other 12 geographies of the world). As Jared Diamond reminds us, human systems must pay attention to their climate, geography and natural ecology in order to make sustainable decisions for survival and connecting with other cities in economic, social, cultural or environmental exchange.

Cities must also develop resilience against attacks from internal invaders (like conflicting values systems) and external predators (like hostile economies that extract financial, human or natural resources without replacing them in a reciprocal exchange). An Integral City is dynamic, adaptive and responsive to both its internal life conditions and external life conditions. The holarchy of nested human systems can be used as mindfulness lenses to help us differentiate perspectives that remind us about different views and different scales. They show us another way that the fractal and holonic existences of human systems and sub-systems interact with one another. When the holarchical map is combined with the four quadrant Integral map of the city, they offer a new organizing principle to interpret information from Global Information Systems (GIS) maps.

An Integral City goes beyond the sustainability of the human systems which it contains and actually adds value to the bio-region in which it is located and/or to the bio-regions to which it is connected. Ultimately this means that an Integral City would be governed by its capacity to develop, maintain and regenerate life-giving resources. Such a city’s health would be measured in the context of the bio-region’s health and the planet’s health.

The Integral maps give us insight into the vibrancy of wholeness of the city and help us to detect when that wholeness is  disconnected and out of synch. They help us understand how the city as a whole functions internally, while seeing the commonalities in the patterns of human systems that link them externally to other cities facing the same affronts to their integralness and thus their capacity for integration and integrity. This map gives us a way to live into the maxim (oft repeated by Meg Wheatley): “If you want to improve the health of a system, connect it to more of itself”.

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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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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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Designing Ecosphere Economies for Planet of Cities

Posted in Ecosphere, H. Research, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 17, 2012 | 2 Comments »


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.

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