Discovery Zone

What is Integral City?

Integral City explores the city as a whole system like the human equivalent of the beehive. It uses an integral meta-framework to reframe the city as a resilient, vibrant human habitat.

Integral City utitizes four key city perspectives as a spiral/integral meta-model to explore the psycho-bio-cultural-social systems of individuals and groups in the city:

Quadrant 1 Explores the Citizen as the source of Intentional — subjective "I" realities (about the individual eg. emotions, psychology, intellect, spirit)
Quadrant 2 Explores the City Manager as the exemplar of Behavioral — objective "It" realities (of the city's bio-physical health and resilience)
Quadrant 3 Explores Civil Society as the representative of Cultural — intersubjective "We" realities (about the relationships and values of groups eg. NGO's, NFP's and Foundations)
Quadrant 4 Explores Developers as the action oriented designer of Social — interobjective "Its" realities (eg. Infrastructures, systems, technologies)

Integral City engages the intentions, behaviours, cultures and social systems of individuals and groups in the city, in the context of climatic/geographic life conditions. It integrates the sciences of living systems, complexity, human development and energy, to optimize the emergence and sustainability of human capacities in the city.

Both Howard Bloom and Ken Holling have proposed that human systems as natural systems go through cycles that maximize production and accumulation, followed by maximizing invention and reassortment. Like Clare Graves, Don Beck and Ken Wilber, they propose that the success at achieving one objective sets the stage for success at achieving the next objective, unfolding an evolutionary hierarchy of nested adaptive cycles. Integral City asks: Does the functioning of those cycles, human systems and the communication amongst them determine the sustainability of a city system?