What is Integral City?

An Integral City views the city as a whole living system. It is the Human Hive. Like the beehive is for the species of the honey bee, the Integral City is the collective habitat for the human species.

An Integral City integrates qualities that create optimal conditions for human innovation and emergence and eco-regional resilience.

An Integral City:

An Integral City meshworks evolutionary intelligence to think about, act in, relate to and work towards creating the healthy city of the future as the process of creating the Human Hive. We view an Integral City through four perspectives, with a systems thinking level of awareness.

Integral City Meshworks Inc. offers services, products, and intelligence for the Human Hive, especially for:

• Cultural Creative Citizens
• City Managers
• Civil Society
• City Asset Developers

What is Meshworking?

Meshworking is the application of meshworking intelligence in the city by Meshworkers. Meshworkers are senior practitioners of  Integral City principles who coordinate different capacities, functions, and locations so that alignment and coherence result in an integrated operating strategy and/or emergency response. Meshworkers create highly sensitive vital signs monitors, able to signal important events that can be effectively remembered and acted upon.

What are Evolutionary Intelligences?

Integral is a term that embraces a global, whole, multi-perspectival way of looking at the world. Integral perspectives include four quadrants (4Q) relating to the bio-psycho-cultural-social domains. (Ken Wilber is the foremost authority on the integral four quadrants.)

The four quadrants embrace the four perspectives that generate individual and collective intelligences as shown in Figure 1:

• I or Subjective, Personal views (Individual Inner Intelligence)
• IT or Objective Bio-Physical views (Individual Outer Intelligence)
• We or Intersubjective, Familial and Cultural views (Collective Cultural Intelligence)
• ITS or Interobjective or Social/Structural views (Collective Structural/Social Intelligence)

Integral also embraces an evolutionary direction of development, that spirals outward into ever increasing levels of complexity. Research shows that on a macro global level at least eight levels of complexity have emerged in the four quadrants as seen in Figure 1. (Clare Graves and Don Beck have researched and written extensively on the spiral dynamic qualities of bio-psycho-cultural-social life conditions.)

Finally, integral has a dynamic, pulsing, vibrational quality that alternates between inward and outward focusing of energy, and collective and individual expressions of values, capacities and forms. (Clare Graves and Don Beck have researched and written extensively on these qualities.)

Thus a city can be viewed from the multiple lenses of 4Quadrants and 8 Levels.

Figure 1: Integral View of City

What is the Human Hive?

As Human Hives, today's cities are complex adaptive systems evolving from the global villages where people from multiple countries of origin, languages, cultures, ethnicities, races and human systems co-exist in the same geographical location. The plurality of human factors creates highly complex life conditions that continuously challenge people's expectations and governance systems that were generally designed for much more homogenous collectives. To see the qualities of the Human Hive we use a systems thinking level of consciousness.

What is a systems thinking level of consciousness?

With systems thinking an Integral City is seen as a living human system that has these qualities:

• develops structures, processes and patterns that ensure short term survival, connection with its environment and long term continuity
• creates 19 infrastructural sub-systems (reflective of all living systems) that control matter, energy and information
• is a meso-scale system (on a planetary basis): located between the micro scale of individual/group and the macro scale of country/globe
• exists as a set of internal and external contexts and/or environments that are nested: holons exist within it (eg. neighbourhoods) and it, in turn, is a holon nested in other wholes (eg. region)
• is quasi-fractal : reflecting patterns at the micro level and seeding patterns at the macro level
• responds dynamically: is ever-changing as it responds to life conditions
• develops unpredictably: the self-organizing nature of the micro systems (individuals and groups) embedded in it, and the feedback loops amongst them, set-up periodic discontinuities and unpredictable shifts
• is interconnected: at the micro, meso-peer and macro levels
• uses simple rules: citizens support conformity, generate diversity, judge life conditions and shift (concentrate and/or diffuse) resources (eg. energy and waste)
• is potentially affected by weak signals: butterfly effects (or weak signals) can affect the stable functioning of the city (eg. SARS, blackouts, forest fires, hurricanes, oil spills)
• is field sensitive: the city is an energetic collision of multiple sources of energy from: cosmos, geology, biology, subjective, intersubjective, objective and interobjective fields.

What is a Healthy City?

WHO's European website, describes a healthy city in these words: "A healthy city is one that is continually creating and improving those physical and social environments and expanding those community resources which enable people to mutually support each other in performing all the functions of life and in developing to their maximum potential". (WHO, 2003). This definition essentially recognizes the four quadrant, developmental nature of the Integral City and was a springboard to developing the concepts explored here and in the book Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive.

Links to Healthy City

What is a City of the Future?

A City of the Future will emerge from today's global village and the complex life conditions that include (but aren't limited to):

• accelerated rates of knowledge generation
• population explosion
• migration
• demographic shifts
• globalization
• accelerating rates of change related to scientific, technological, communications and transportation
• increasing concentrated use of energy
• increasing diffusion of wastes and toxins
• declining access to the supporting resources of life (eg. water, food, energy, raw materials for production)

The City of the Future may respond ineffectively to these conditions and thus magnify the dysfunctions of today's global village. Alternatively, the City of the Future may discover the path to the Human Hive as a way of being together that offers greater wellbeing, by responding to change with creativity and innovation and developing Vital Signs Monitors that track:

• effective processes that allow it to implement and operate systems that responsibly "metabolize" energy as an Ecocity (eg. water, air, waste, information management)
• resilient structures of a living system that are attuned to its habitat and responsive to local and global economies (eg. technology, transportation, utilities)
• continuous learning from experience because of collaborative relationships internally and externally.

The City of the Future as a transition zone to the Human Hive, therefore, requires different values than cities of the past including:

1. Balancing action, thinking, productivity and relationship values
2. Being open to new ideas
3. Integrating multiple ideas with non-linear thinking
4. Embracing connected individuality
5. Emphasizing dynamic sustainability

Links to City of the Future

What is Eco-Regional Resilience?

The Human Hive must learn from the honey bees how not only to sustain their collective habitat, but also how to sustain and steward the eco-region to which it belongs. This requires the highest practise of Ecosphere Intelligences, adapting to and responding to the climatic and geographic habitat in which it is locate.

Links to Eco-Regional Resilience.

 

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