Marilyn Hamilton's Blog, page 30

Reframing 10 Urban Injustices: With Master Code of Care

Last week I was inspired by the focus of Urban Arena Europe (UAE) to consider Social Justice and Sustainability in the cities of Europe.

As an Urban Arena Europe Fellow, I had expected to meet in person at a Barcelona conference on June 4 and 5, 2020 to review the research that had identified the 10 Urban Injustices that had been summarized in a pre-circulated Booklet on the drivers of injustice (see Table 1 below).

In this age of Coronavirus, instead of the face-to-face meeting, UAE members convened online, with the able guidance of Panagiota Kotsila and the Barcelona team. Duncan Crowley got us comfortable thinking about ourselves as a Community of Practice with a well-illustrated PowerPoint overview of the many resources that Urban Arena has organized (downloadable here) .

On June 4, our Day 1, over 60 attendees from close to 20 cities were organized into 10 inquiries – each with a focus on one of the Injustices (see Table 1).

Table 1: 10 Urban Injustices (with links to YouTube images and explanations)
1.        Exclusive Access to Benefits of Urban Sustainability Infrastructure. Driver of urban injustice #1
2.       Material and Livelihood Inequalities. Driver of urban injustice #2
3.       Racialized or Ethnically Exclusionary Urbanization. Driver of urban injustice #3
4.       Uneven and Excluding Urban Intensification and Regeneration. Driver of urban injustice #4
5.       Uneven Environmental Health and Pollution Patterns. Driver of urban injustice #5
6.       Unfit Institutional Structures. Driver of injustice #6
7.       Limited Citizen Participation in Urban Planning. Driver of urban injustice #7
8.       Lack of Effective Knowledge Brokerage and Stewardship Opportunities. Driver of urban injustice #8
9.       Unquestioned Neoliberal Growth and Austerity Urbanism. Driver of urban injustice #9
10.   Weak(ened) Civil Society. Driver of urban injustice #10

As we discovered in our individual groups, whatever topic we considered, was likely connected to many (if not most) of the other topics. For instance,  Access to Urban Sustainability Infrastructure connected to Material and Livelihood Inequalities through circumstances like the conflicts caused by gentrification changing the very neighbourhoods where mobility options for public transit had originally been built to improve urban access for low income families who could no longer afford to live there.

On June 5, our Day 2 we broke into a different collection of groups to examine 5 strategies that are impacting cities as they struggle to reconcile the options for increasing sustainability, such as re-naturing cities, while at the same time as enabling the emergence of urban food systems.

Table 2: Urban Arena Social In/Justice Themes Day 2



Renaturing cities – nature based solutions 


Gentrification, city branding and counter policies 


Local food, sustainable food, urban food systems


Ecofeminist approaches to urban sustainability 


Social and climate justice in city politics 

Over both days, we explored the many paradoxes that have arisen because cities have pursued sustainable infrastructure and energy systems but have often failed to recognize how those systems would result in unintended consequences. In many ways the pursuit of sustainability has harmed people through social injustices that impact their health (e.g. through air/water/soil pollution of transport systems), their livelihoods (e.g. disconnecting people from access to work), and their regeneration (e.g. separating people from enjoyment of Nature.)

How Could Integral City Reframe Causes and Consequences?

After this rich exploration with a dedicated and well-informed Community of Practice I was curious to see how Integral City frameworks could bring some meta-analysis and synthesis to our work. I found four possible points of insight.

1.First, I noted that these Injustice impacts attack the very substance of wellbeing in a healthy city as a complex adaptive living system: they undermine peoples’ survival, connections to the environment and regeneration.

2. Secondly, I observed that when we use several key maps from Integral City, we can notice patterns that could prevent some of these inequalities, remedy solutions for the injustices and restore aliveness to the cities.

The first pattern I noticed from an analysis of Table 1 is that the first five Injustices relate to what Integral City calls “Placemaking”. They focus on the external qualities of objective behaviors and interobjective infrastructures of the city (right hand quadrants in Figure 1.)  The second five Injustices relate to what we call “Placecaring” – and relate to the subjective consciousness and intersubjective cultures of the city (the left-hand quadrants in Figure 1).

Figure 1: Placemaking & Placecaring

In discussion at the closing Webinar, these right vs left tensions, were described as Technology and Communitarianism. And it was agreed that a healthy city needs to balance both in relation to each other, the geographic/climatic environment and the convergence of many cultures that our cities now hold.

3. Thirdly I noticed that the dilemmas in our cities span multiple scales. From Individual to Group to Place (City/Ecoregion) to Planet. For the most part the injustices in cities that we discussed showed that one of these scales was out of alignment with its relationship to the other scales. Thus, when we focus on just external sustainability for the City, we overlook the impacts on People as well as how the whole Planet suffers.

As a result of this observation, I ask us to consider, “What would happen if we double-checked our proposals for sustainability strategies, by using the Master Code of Care?”  In making decisions using this Code we could include Care for all 4 scales at the same time (see Figure 2):

Care for People as individuals and collectives
Care for Place
And Care for Planet.

Figure 2: Master Code of Care

4. Finally, when we zoom down from the Planet scale to Europe as a continent of eco-regions that contains a multitude of cities along its river systems, applying the Master Code of Care would invite in all the 4 Voices of the City (see Figure 3): citizens, civic managers, business/innovators, civil society) (and other cities in its eco-region – thus engaging everyone impacted by sustainability decisions in an encounter that is designed to be socially just from the start.

Figure 3: 4 Voices of the City

Thus, Integral City frameworks could enable us to integrate the differing perspectives of the city – balancing Placemaking with Placecaring; aligning with the Master Code of Care the 4 scales of living fractal systems; and engaging the 4+1 Voices of the City/Eco-Region to design social justice into sustainability approaches that respect the core tenets of our cities as complex adaptive living systems.
References

Hamilton, M. (2020). Urban Hub 20: Accelerating City Change in a VUCA World. Integral Mentors.

Hamilton, M. (2019). Integral City: Meshworking Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive. Amaranth Press: Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Hamilton, M. (2019). Integral City Inquiry and Action: Designing Impact for the Human Hive. Amaranth Press: Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Hamilton, M. (2018). Integral City 3.7: Reframing Complex Challenges for Gaias Human Hives. Amaranth Press: Minneapolis, Minnesota.

News Flash – Urban Hub 20: Accelerating City Change in a VUCA World

Accelerate City Change in our VUCA World: This is a Special Integral City Reflective  Organ Issue to hear from the 4+1 Voices of Integral City. As the planet of cities is in a cycle of unprecedented lockdowns, physical distancing and shielding, we want to get up close and personal with the  Power of the Master Code of Care.

Urban Hub 20: Accelerating City Change in a VUCA World

… gives you the wisdom and insights of over 20 Wisdom Keepers of Integral City practices, tools and maps.

Scroll down to order your FREE e-graphic book now.

Urban Hub 20 – Accelerating City Change in a VUCA World is the twentieth book in the series from Integral Urban Hub and IntegralMENTORS.  For this 20:20 vision of our VUCA world we have asked the creator of Integral City Meshworks Dr. Marilyn Hamilton to take on the task of our first-ever guest curator. Marilyn, author of the Integral City Book Series, has a vast experience in this area with a great network of fellow integralists. She has been inspired by the pioneer of city planning and sociology Patrick Geddes. His Outlook Tower, Camera Obscura and Summer Schools renewed old Edinburgh. We hope that the results of this highly readable and informative volume can renew and regenerate cities today. Together we have imagined how an Integral City Meshwork enables us to respond in a wholistic way to the life conditions of our VUCA world.

Take a look inside the book with the Sample Meshwork we have created below. Then scroll to the end to obtain your own copy (206 full colour pages).

We hope you enjoy our co-creation and share it widely.

Power Conscious Change in the Human Hive
How can we face the unprecedented complex challenges our cities face today – with Coronavirus and Climate Change?

How can we create the conditions to accept, respond and transform the life of the “Human Hive” to thrive as an Integral City in a VUCA world?

Urban Hub 20 – Accelerating City Change in a VUCA World convenes a constellation of Wise Elders, Healers, Coaches and Designers in virtual space and in city hall around a model or map of your city. Each Wisdom Keeper brings their graphic model of how they serve the city’s wellbeing. As these models are set up, imagine we attune to the Spirit of the City. We ask in Silence:

What does Gaia want?
What does this Eco-region want?
What does the City want?
What do all our Human Systems want?
What do I as a person want?

From the Silence imagine an invitation for each contributor to share their gifts. Open the covers of this book and walk through its pages – as the Lisbon Urban Arena team did. Like Lisbon, appreciate and select the models that show us how to Care for Self, Others, Place and Planet. Now let’s use this wisdom within our cities, between our city-regions and around the globe to:

Collaborate with one other.
Catalyze collaboration with others located in our own places.
Accelerate city transformation globally.

How and Where to Order Free Graphic e-Book

You can order the graphic book in two formats – Slideshare for a Free pdf download. And Issuu for viewing as a Free Online Flipbook.

If you want a hardcopy – then order from Amazon. Here are all the links.

SlideShare: FREE Download

https://www.slideshare.net/PauljvsSS/urban-hub20-accelerating-citychangein-a-vuca-world-thriveable-cities

ISSUU: Free Online Flipbook (Issuu registration required)

https://issuu.com/paulvanschaik/docs/urbanhub20-vuca3

Amazon: Order Hard Copy

ISBN-10:1660970334
ISBN-13:978-1660970339

UK      https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1660970334

Spain    https://www.amazon.es/dp/1660970334

Germany  https://www.amazon.de/dp/1660970334

USA    https://www.amazon.com/dp/1660970334

This Urban Hub 20 Announcement is part of a series of Blogs. Find the links to all of them below.

News Flash – Urban Hub 20 Accelerating City Change in a VUCA World


Urban Hub 20 – See What’s Inside


Urban Hub 20 Imagines the Human Hive in a Vuca World

Click here to join us on Mighty Network for regular conversations with the Integral and Nest City Constellations . Learn about our events and programs.

Urban Hub 20 Imagines the Human Hive in a VUCA World

I am very “chuffed” with the release of the new graphic e-book 

Urban Hub 20: Accelerating City Change in a VUCA World

It was conceived from imagining how the Power of the Master Code of Care could catalyze city change. The contributors who imagined with me for this book, not only shared their powerful insights in words but had the talents and teams to translate the words into images. When you open the covers of this book I hope you are attracted and tempted to keep turning the pages … to explore, admire and learn how these approaches use Integral City frameworks. They are coherent in contributing to the Human Hive as a living, complex adaptive system that can be appreciated as a Whole. In curating this volume, I offered it as a service to a VUCA World (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) – struggling with responding to climate change, when we started to gather in the contributions. Few of us foresaw that it would be published into a World  traumatized by coronavirus. As we emerge into the recovery stages of this unexpected experience, we know that the Integral City’ s Urban Hub view of the World in 2020 will offer powerful designs for regenerating wellbeing that will accelerate and enliven the next stage of evolution for the Human Hive well into the next decade. 

In this blog I share some of the beautiful pages that inspired me – I hope they entice you to obtain your copy the whole (Free) book.

Scroll down to order your FREE e-graphic book now.
Power Conscious Change in the Human Hive
How and Where to Order Free Graphic e-Book

You can order the graphic book in two formats – Slideshare for a Free pdf download. And Issuu for viewing as a Free Online Flipbook.

How and Where to Order Free Graphic e-Book

You can order the graphic book in two formats – Slideshare for a Free pdf download. And Issuu for viewing as a Free Online Flipbook.

If you want a hardcopy – then order from Amazon. Here are all the links.

SlideShare: FREE Download

https://www.slideshare.net/PauljvsSS/urban-hub20-accelerating-citychangein-a-vuca-world-thriveable-cities

ISSUU: Free Online Flipbook (Issuu registration required)

https://issuu.com/paulvanschaik/docs/urbanhub20-vuca3

Amazon: Order Hard Copy

ISBN-10:1660970334
ISBN-13:978-1660970339

UK      https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1660970334

Spain    https://www.amazon.es/dp/1660970334

Germany  https://www.amazon.de/dp/1660970334

USA    https://www.amazon.com/dp/1660970334

This Urban Hub 20 Announcement is part of a series of Blogs. Find the links to all of them below.



News Flash – Urban Hub 20 Accelerating City Change in a VUCA World


Urban Hub 20 – See What’s Inside


Urban Hub 20 Imagines the Human Hive in a Vuca World

Urban Hub 20 – See What’s Inside

Urban Hub 20 – Accelerating City Change in a VUCA World

Read the News Flash Announcement here.

Take a look inside the book Introduction, Contributors and Section Heads below.

Then scroll to the end to obtain your own copy (206 full colour pages).

We hope you enjoy our co-creation from the Integral World and share it widely.

Power Conscious Change in the Human Hive

How and Where to Order Free Graphic e-Book

You can order the graphic book in two formats – Slideshare for a Free pdf download. And Issuu for viewing as a Free Online Flipbook.

How and Where to Order Free Graphic e-Book

You can order the graphic book in two formats – Slideshare for a Free pdf download. And Issuu for viewing as a Free Online Flipbook.

If you want a hardcopy – then order from Amazon. Here are all the links.

SlideShare: FREE Download

https://www.slideshare.net/PauljvsSS/urban-hub20-accelerating-citychangein-a-vuca-world-thriveable-cities

ISSUU: Free Online Flipbook (Issuu registration required)

https://issuu.com/paulvanschaik/docs/urbanhub20-vuca3

Amazon: Order Hard Copy

ISBN-10:1660970334
ISBN-13:978-1660970339

UK      https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1660970334

Spain    https://www.amazon.es/dp/1660970334

Germany  https://www.amazon.de/dp/1660970334

USA    https://www.amazon.com/dp/1660970334

This Urban Hub 20 Announcement is part of a series of Blogs. Find the links to all of them below.



News Flash – Urban Hub 20 Accelerating City Change in a VUCA World


Urban Hub 20 – See What’s Inside


Urban Hub 20 Imagines the Human Hive in a Vuca World

Integral City Reflective Organ March Equinox 2020: Superordinate Goal in a VUCA World

This newsletter is published quarterly using a cycle of perspectives on the Integral City viewed from: Planet, People, Place and Power. The theme of this issue is Planet.

...when we bring together the 4+1 Voices of many cities, we can cocreate the next generation of IT—the Integral Technology that will enable us to design cities using the Master Code—the Evolutionary Intelligence of Care. This is so needed by our Planet of Cities to create a planet-centric Integral Ecology …. By aligning our Caring Capacities, we will naturally expand the Carrying Capacity of our Smart and Resilient Cities. We may also take the critical next steps to  avoid the human version of Colony Collapse Disorder that our dancing cousins the bees have warned us about. Integral City Inquiry & Action offers a design choreography to invent the dance that integrates the intelligences of the Smart, Resilient, and Integral Cities and wake up the Human Hive to its full potential and cocreate the life conditions for city well-being!

Hamilton, M. (2017). Integral City Inquiry & Action: Design Impact for the Human Hive. Phoenix, AZ: Integral Publishers, p.321.

Scroll to end of newsletter to access Free Resources.

Is Superordinate Goal the Gift of Covid19?

In our VUCA world, confused and confounded by the rapid global spread of covid19, we may be viewing the unexpected emergence of a superordinate goal that is quickly aligning a plurality of nations, cities, citizens and experts to work together for survival.

A superordinate goal (a term coined by Dr. Don Beck, co-author of Spiral Dynamics) is a goal that transcends and includes multiple other goals so that all stakeholders work together. This empowering alignment has the capacity to resolve often contradictory, opposing and polarized factions. A superordinate goal is the anchor, attractor and energizer for the emergence of a Meshwork.

Ironically , to wake up the world to the superordinate goal, it has taken a disease that threatens the practical, political and personal survival of individuals and collectives. As the covid19disease spreads, takes its tolls and stretches all our resourcefulness, a veil is parting that reveals our need to cooperate and collaborate to survive this microbial threat. More than that, as it travels is it revealing the necessity for us to honour universal ONEness, our vast interconnectedness and our need to align strategies, resources and compassion on multiple levels of complexity?

As I write this newsletter, I am involved  in the Findhorn Community’s response to strengthening our personal and collective immunity. We continue in service to the health of our Planet and the transformation of our being/doing/relating/co-creating courses and activities. However, even as we affirm our service to Life, Love and Learning, we have made difficult decisions to close down our classes and cease operations for 2 months. We respond both proactively to our own decisions for community wellbeing, as well as the National Health Service guidelines and federal edits. At the same time, we are faced with economic questions about supporting our co-workers, the wider community and assisting our most vulnerable.

Simultaneously, we also invest ever more intentionally in the practices that are our strengths: Deep Inner Listening, Co-creating with the Intelligences of Nature, Work as Love in Action, Living Roots of Community and Attunement to Collective Consciousness. All of these ways of being give us an Overview of Wholeness and how we can serve Wellbeing – cosmically, globally and locally.

(Click to read the Full Editorial Here.)

VUCA World – Contact or Contract?

Contract can mean “to confirm an agreement” or “to reduce/diminish/withdraw in size”. In the English language it is ambiguous, paradoxical and ironic that the same word can mean both a positive affirming energy and a negative declining energy.

In the VUCA world of a pandemic like covid19 both meanings of the word “contract” are in play. As the world is being given orders to stop contact, the daily contracts we depend on as implicit agreements that govern dependable life conditions are being broken or denounced. In shock and/or defiance it is natural for us to contract and hunker down into protective positions.

Thus, we are experiencing the tensions that arise from simultaneously experiencing both meanings of “contract”. And when we are told “no contact” is a key strategy for avoiding or slowing the spread of covid19, how are humans to resolve the tensions of contract/contract?

If ever we sought a lived example of VUCA we are now living in global scale times of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. VUCA is no longer a military term – it is becoming the only way we can describe our daily realities.

Ironically the official responses to covid19, of isolation and quarantine may elicit the counter-response of community caring and compassion. Because, although the death rate seems high (by comparison to common flu but lower than SARS) the virus is likely to visit most communities and the only way we will be able to counteract all the downturns is to bring together the 4 Voices and enact the Master Code of Care – regardless of what the government/official edicts say.

In the middle of difficult times, the best policy is always the Truth. And that seems to be the most challenging behaviour for our officials to deliver.

While it may be a natural (defensive) reaction to contract in the face of attack, the lessons of the bees and the 4 voices is to do exactly the opposite – we should be in contact with one another. Connecting and reassuring and serving and caring engender positive psychology which is the greatest support we can give our immune systems. Fortuitously our technology allows us to connect without physical contact – and for a time we must practise social distancing physically but use the video/audio options that enable our mirror neurons to respond to the body language of our family, friends, neighbours, colleagues and even our officials.  (Click here to read the Full Article.)

Integral City: 3 Books Launch

In the midst of our VUCA conundrums Integral City is inspired to announce 3 book launches in service to our Planet, Gaia.

Our Associate and Core Team Member, Beth Sanders, announces the realease of Nest City:  In keeping with our VUCA, low social contact season, Beth is hosting an online Book Launch that you can celebrate – get the details below.

Integral City Book 1, Edition 2 has been released to Amazon. Integral City Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive Edition 2 has a new Foreword by Evolution Biologist Elisabet Sahtouris.

Marilyn Hamilton Founder of Integral City has joined forces with Paul van Schaik, Founder of Integral Mentor to curate and publish a new Urban Hub 20. The theme of this graphic book is Accelerating City Transformation in VUCA Times. More than 20 contributors have imagined themselves responding with integrally-informed responses to VUCA life conditions in ONECity – exemplified by the real city of Lisbon.

Scroll down for all the details.

In Nest City, Beth Sanders argues that our linear ways of thinking about, organizing and planning our cities does not meet the true nature of cities as complex and messy systems. There are no simple solutions to the challenges we face: many citizens don’t feel they belong; we don’t agree about how to best move around; many don’t have jobs, or homes they can afford; we make running businesses challenging; and we are facing challenges with the climate crisis. At a time when understanding the relationship between our physical, economic and social habitats is essential, Sanders sets forth an approach to work with the disruptions of our times.

Drawing on her experience as a city planner and a relationship-broker in the conflicts that surface in city life, Sanders offers several strategies to explore how citizens, public institutions, community organizations and the business community can work together to improve our cities. She explores the evolutionary nature of our relationship with cities, and how the tension we experience in city life compels each of us to work to improve our cities. Our work is what regenerates our cities. The city habitats we make for ourselves are as good as we choose to make them. If they’re not good enough, it’s up to us to improve them.

The result is a book that articulates the importance of having a sense of direction, being willing as citizens and cities to learn along the way, and accept the uncertainty and messiness of cities as opportunities to improve our cities–so they serve citizens well. Nest City will forever alter the way you look at your city, your local public institutions and community organizations and business–and how you think about and contribute to your city. Order your copy here.

Book 1 Edition 2 Announcement – Integral City Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive – new Foreword by Elisabet Sahtouris

Evolving City Intelligences multiply and integrate all city capacities.

Marilyn Hamilton was an early researcher of Integral frameworks. Integral City Edition 2 is a significant application of the Integral model to the city scale of human systems. With more than 60% of humanity now living in cities, I recommend you learn how Integral City gives us critical intelligences to evolve the human hive.

—Ken Wilber, Integral Philosopher & Visionary, Author: Sex, Ecology & Spirituality; Integral Vision; Integral Spirituality

How are we evolving the human hive? 60% of humanity now lives in cities. Can city dwellers, like bees who pollinate the fields, act so intelligently, they add value to the planet? How can the clash of differences that separate people, purpose, profits and priorities generate fresh energy to solve 21st century VUCA problems? How do we propagate new pathways for community learning and give the 4 Voices of the city, fresh hope?

“Every city can enhance its own health with the unique and wonderful tools of this book and its field book, which enable readers to go deeply into, and thus truly understand, their city’s collective human psyche along with its physical infrastructure and thus to move forward in the way of genuine living entities. Read this book, share it with every ally you can, take it to your City Hall and get moving. There is a better world for us all ahead!” Foreword to Edition 2, Elisabet Sahtouris , Evolution Biologist

Urban Hub 20: Accelerating City Transformation in a VUCA World





Urban Hub 20: Accelerating City Transformation in a VUCA World

This graphic book curates an imaginal assembly of Integral practitioners. This thought experiment reveals how we might face unprecedented complex challenges. How can we create the conditions to accept, respond and transform the life of the Human Hive to thrive in a VUCA world? What would happen if a core of integrally-informed practitioners all lived in the same city? How could we enable our city to transform challenges into opportunities? How could we share our learning with other cities – like Lisbon who has volunteered to imagine itself into this experiment?

Imagine that we convene in city hall library around a model of the city. Each contributor brings a 3D working model of how they can serve the city’s wellbeing. Before these models are set up, imagine that we sit in a circle and attune to the Spirit of the City. We ask in Silence: What does Gaia want? What does this Eco-region want? What does the City want? What do all our Human Systems want? What do I as a person want?

From the Silence we hear an invitation for each contributor to share their gifts. Open the covers of this book and walk through its pages appreciating the models that show us how to Care for Self, Others, Place and Planet. Now let’s ask: How do we collaborate with each other? How do we catalyze collaboration with others located in our own places?  How do we accelerate city transformation globally?

Urban Hub 20 will be published in April 2020. Check for the Free Downloads here:

Urban Hub – Thriveable Cities books are available gratis at 

https://issuu.com/paulvanschaik/docs

and downloaded from https://www.slideshare.net/PauljvsSS

Paperback copies are available from Amazon 

Upcoming Integral City Events with Planetary Purpose

 

Integral City will be presenting at Integral Europe Conference 2020. Join us on May 30 for our Workshop on the Urban Hub 20.

We will share our research on “Accelerating City Transformation in VUCA Times”.  Discover how a constellation of 20 Integral Catalysts and Meshworkers might work in the City of Lisbon if we all gathered in service to the superordinate goal of its wellbeing. In the course of our research we have considered the challenges of Climate Change and Coronavirus. And we are applying ways to Optimize Our Integral City Practice.

Just click here to register at the IEC20 website.

Beth Sanders says “It’s been a long time coming! This was going to be an in-person celebration in Edmonton, but since we are all staying home these days, it feels like an opportunity to celebrate the release of Nest City with people from well beyond Edmonton. Physical isolation is an opportunity!

In Nest City, Beth Sanders argues that our linear ways of thinking about, organizing and planning our cites do not meet the true nature of cities and complex and messy systems. There are no simple solutions to the challenges we face. At a time when understanding the relationship between our physical, economic and social habitats is essential, Sanders sets forth an approach to work with the disruptions of our times.

The city habitats we make for ourselves are as good as we choose to make them. If they’re not good enough, it’s up to us to improve them. Messiness and uncertainty are opportunities for improvement. What contributions do we wish to make to our cities? 

This gathering has three purposes: to celebrate the release of the book, to share a bit about Nest City with you, and as a wee community explore the implications for our contributions, to our cities.

What to expect:

Celebration (bring whatever you’d like to eat and drink)
A few bits of reading from  Nest City
Conversation with friends (new and old) to explore the reading
Celebration
Click here to Attend the Zoom Virtual Celebration April 19, 2020.

Beyond Smart Online: Integral City Practices, Tools & Maps


For Practitioners. (Online)

This 3-day course online (each daily session is 90 – 120 minutes) introduces “practitioners” to just the basics of the Integral City model. You will learn the framework of practices, tools and maps that reveal the common patterns that impact the lives of individuals, organizations and communities within your city. This short course explores three powerful images animating Integral City systems – the integral map, the meshwork and the human hive. You will learn from your own situations and each other how the toolkit guides you beyond models for Urban Ecovillages and Traditional, Smart and Resilient Cities. (Each course repeats as 3 Days Online: 90 – 120 minutes each day –  April 3-5, 2020, Nov. 27-29, 2020) Click here for MORE INFO

Beyond Resilient: Integral City Inquiry Action & Impact
For Catalysts.

This 4-day course is for “catalysts” to explore inquiry and action that inspires productive impact for reinventing today’s cities for the future. You will interact with the 4+1 Voices of the Integral City (Business, Local Government, Civil Society and Citizens, plus actors from other regional cities) to identify strategic possibilities. Integral City introduces you to new ways to think about, act in, relate to and reinvent the city as a Human Hive. Through placecaring and placemaking, we invite you to discover the unique contributions you make to its aliveness. We believe the future of cities will emerge not just from the bottom up through Smart City Technology or the top down through Resilient approaches – but from the integrated actions of the 4+1 Voices in all the cities in your eco-region, as you reinvent your Human Hives. (4 Days, Findhorn, Scotland, Oct. 10-14, 2020.) Click Here for MORE INFO

Beyond Complexity: Integral City Care Context & Capacity

For Meshworkers.

This 4-day course is for “meshworkers” to imagine how to reframe simplicity on the other side of complexity in the Integral City – or Human Hive. You will join graduates of prior training to build on the Integral City practitioner and catalyst competencies to apply new skills to a live case study. You will look at the city through the lenses of Care, Contexting and Capacity Building. You will view the city as a complex, adaptive living innovation eco-system, where the internal and external connections amongst the 4+1 voices of the city (Citizens, Civil Society, City/Institutional Managers, Business/Innovators (and other cities) enable conditions for thriving today. You will seek to align intra-city and inter-regional collaborations through caring for people, contexting for place and capacity building for purpose. This course introduces the practices of “meshworking”, so that practitioners who work with individual organizations and catalysts who build bridges between organizations can engage with the city as a whole. (4 Days, Findhorn, Scotland, Aug. 29 – Sept. 2, 2020). FOR MORE INFO CLICK HERE.

Celebrating Planet-of-Cities in the Coming Quarter of 2020

March 20 marked the start of what Integral City calls the Planet Quarter (from March 20 to June 20). What amazing acts of planetary care have you witnessed in these challenging days of the covid19 Season? What caring community and city gardeners, cooks and delivery people have inspired you?  How are you seeing the melting of national boundaries even as we are called to practise social distancing and borders are closing?

We have a NEW INVITATION to vist us on our Mighty Nework as well as our Integral City Website and Blog . Your comments and interaction with our constellation of Integral City and Nest City communities are most WELCOME.

Meshful Blessings for our Planet of Cities from
Marilyn Hamilton and the Integral City Constellation Corps Team
PS Here are some FREE resources for nurturing our Planet and Human Hives as we transform from VUCA challenges to collective empowerment:

Interview with Daniel Christian Wahl about Regenerativity & Integral City (January 6, 2020) – Click Summary Here and C lick Podcast Here
VUCA Responses That are Positive & Capacity Building




Sarah McCrum’s Free Energy Activation and Immune System Strengthening.

Activation for Collective Healing

Lessons From Healing People That We Can Apply to Healing Humanity

OR

https://courses.sarahmccrum.com/courses/activation-for-collective-healing

https://courses.sarahmccrum.com/courses/lessons-from-healing

Hay House for VUCA times offers a  free resource page  with movies, podcasts, meditations, articles, and eBooks.
Earth Day Announces New Way of Sharing April 22, 2020: Earth Day Network is postponing its live 50th anniversary Earth Day event. Instead, April 22 will mark the first Digital Earth Day, a global digital mobilization to address the most urgent threats to people and planet. Stay tuned here for sign-on instructions.





Blogs

Coronavirus – Opportunity or Threat?

Is Superordinate Goal the Gift of Covid19?
VUCA World – Contact or Contract?
Optimizing & Optimistic Resources for Integral City Practitioners
Riding the Wave of Death & Dying to Wellbeing
Sans Peur – Without Fear

Evolving Cities of Peace

·       Integral City: Evolving Gaia’s Organs of Peace
·       How Can We Create Cities of Peace When We Have Disturbed Gaia’s Peace?
·       Our Evolutionary Journey to the Master Code of Care for a City of Peace
·       How is the Integral City Framework Good For Evolving Cities of Peace?

Making a Place We Can All Call Home: Wrestling with VUCA – Through Placemaking As Wellbeing By Design – 6 Part Series by Dr. Ian Wight

·       In Pursuit of Ecological Wisdom: Inter-Subjective According in the Noosphere?
·       Place, Placemaking and Placemakers: Poetic Agency in Communion
·       Coming Home to Ourselves – Praxis-making
·       Co-Creative Integrities – Ethos-making
·       Enacting our Knowing, Doing and Being – In Service in a VUCA World
·       Telling We-Stories to Our Future: A Poiesis of Sophrosynes?

Dharma Sharing|: Fay Blackburn Lived the Master Code of Care

Organizational Power: Power Over – Power With – Power As

Newsletters Past Issues 2019

Integral City Reflective Organ – March 2019: Are Cities Evolving as Gaia’s Reflective Organs?

Integral City Reflective Organ – June 2019: 4 Voices Imagine the Human Hive

Integral City Reflective Organ – September 2019: Strike the City vs City on Strike

Integral City Reflective Organ – December 2019: Power Over – Power With – Power As 

Integral City MetaBlog 2019 – A synthesis and index of all Integral City Blogs from 2019.

ORGANIZATIONAL POWER: POWER OVER – POWER WITH – POWER AS

By Marilyn Hamilton for Enlivening Edge Magazine

This article was adapted for Enlivening Edge Magazine with a focus Organizations from an examination of Power in Cities as the editorial in Integral City’s December 2019 Newsletter : Gaia’s Reflective Organ: Power: Over, With and As.

Power Over

In today’s world too often, Power is associated with Power Over. The news delights in reporting the conflicts that Power Over engenders, and we regularly read about stories of Power Over at all levels of human scale from individual to family to organization to city and nation and planet.

But the news is changing because those who have been the victims of Power Over are pushing back. Many of the resistors are pushing back against organizations—both from within and without. (And most of the organizations are located in cities—where nearly half of all people naturally live, work, relate and co-create.)

Power With

In such circumstances, it is hard to imagine how Power Over could transform into Power With. But out of the ashes of the fires of human insecurity—related to climate, water, food, energy, culture and finance—has arisen a whole value chain of service providers trying to meet the needs of the most destitute. Many Not-for-Profit (NFP) and NGO organizations have mustered the will and the way to build bridges between communities of need and organizational capacities for delivering care .

Power With brings into the power equation the power of feminine ways of knowing—the power emerging from the deepest relationships of bonding, belonging and caring.

Power As

Thus, Power With is creating the conditions for a more complex practice of Power As.

Power Over is dominator-based.

Power With is relationship-based.

Power As is consciousness-based.

Power As combines both the masculine and feminine sources of power into a fully human—or some would say even Gaian—source of power.

Power As recognizes that each person has the capacity to be purpose-driven in a way that can transcend and include domination for appropriate reasons, like responding quickly to disasters. Power As also transcends and includes relationships (for bonding, belonging and collaborating) to co-create and meshwork organizations that are situation-responsive cultures and structures.

We see Power As enacted by those who have been willing to step into the fires caused by Power Over and Power With, witness the deepest truths (however uncomfortable), come alongside others (to strengthen and help them release their powerful capacities) and be open to learning why Nature, Life, Consciousness, Gaia (aka the Divine) has evolved humans—both individuals and collectives—for a higher purpose.

We see Power As called forth by Dr. Monica Sharma who has worked at the UN so deeply, broadly, widely that she speaks of the Power we possess when we see the Practical, Political and Personal as a system with the capacities to meet any challenge.

Her colleague and scientist (and Nobel Laureate) Dr. Karen O’Brien integrates this wisdom into climate challenges researched by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) where she has served as a social scientist for 25 years.

Likewise, Terry Patten, Founder of State of Emergence and lifetime activist has shifted his influence on power into framing a new kind of organization that has aspects of private, NFP and public sectors. He calls it a “New Republic of the Heart” that explicitly reveals the heart-based intelligence that lies at the core of Power As.

Thomas Hübl’s online inquiry into Trauma and Healing and Charles Eisenstein’s vision of a “beautiful Earth we know is possible” also evoke and enact Power As through agencies of capacity-building that are emerging new niches in the ecology of organizations..

Power As can be practised by individuals empowered to tap into deep knowing or not-knowing (as Charles Eisenstein would suggest) in service to a purpose greater than any one person.

Power As can be practised by collectives, able and willing to act as WE-Holders, tuning into a collective consciousness (perhaps exemplified by Spiritual Activist Alistair McIntosh with his Scottish Land Reformers and the Lorian’s Subtle Activists tapping into the Subtle Realms as life partners from other different dimensions).

Power As would result in a worldview naturally arising from making decisions through what Integral City calls the lens of the Master Code – to Care for Self, Others, Place and Planet.

Even as we have declared our current age to be human-centered, we enter the era when Power As is called into being, because Power Over has been applied not only to every scale of human life but to every form of life on this planet. Power Over without the transmutation of Power With and Power As has proven to be ultimately disruptive, traumatizing, and life-destroying.

Power As is also called forth because Power With seems powerless against Power Over. Power With has the best intentions to include Power Over in the dialogues and collaborations it imagines and attempts.

But Power With fails to recognize the capacity for hijacking resources that Power Over can too easily manipulate. Only Power As is willing to speak Truth to Power Over and offer Appropriate Love (and not be naively manipulated) to Power With. Power As has the wisdom to act AS Life to realign and recalibrate the inappropriate use of the Powers that have evolved in earlier eras.

Humanity’s Organizational Legacy

When we stand at this point in time and look backwards, it is too easy to simply condemn Power Over and Power With as incapable and unworthy. But each of those eras was powered by natural fuels that enabled the accumulation of power as wealth and knowledge that set the life conditions for the next Power to emerge.

Bio Fire – enabled Power Over. Cultural Power Over was powered by the forests and peat that could be collected from the Earth’s surface and support the spread of agriculture.

Fossil Fuels – enabled Power With. Without the accumulation of wealth enabled by fossil fuels, mined from below Earth’s surface, Power With culture could not have emerged to try to right the injustices caused by Power Over structures and systems.

Solar/Renewables – enable Power As. Without being able to source our energy needs from natural sources like the natural systems that build up life on Earth, we would not have the natural models, teachers, or sciences that show us how Power As is shared in Integral Ecologies and circular organizational metabolisms.

When we look back at the evolutionary trajectory of Power Over, Power With and Power As we can perhaps appreciate that Power has always been a blessing and a curse in human life.

But perhaps now we have matured enough as a species that as we access and use our Power, we can take responsibility for the rules of engagement (and related authority) and relationships (and related influence) that Power As can reveal to us.

We look to the new faith practices (like subtle/spiritual activism), universal patterns of life-giving principles (like New Republic of the Heart) and holistic decision sets (like the Master Code) to guide us through the maturing of our stage of Power As.

May that be the legacy we will remember from this Age of Humanity , with and as Gaia’s Reflective Organs.

Optimizing & Optimistic Resources for Integral City Practitioners

Some years ago after the Integral Europe Conference 2014 I published a series of blogs inspired by Dr. Roger Walsh’s keynote on how integrally-informed professionals could be of service to the world. He and others have remarked about the underpinning and overstanding and interpenetration of OPTIMISM that an integral worldview can bring to “Karma Yoga”.

At this time of global discombobulation it seems an appropriate time to revisit these OPTIMIZATIONS for insipiration and guidance.

For the 4 + 1 Voices of the City is the series for amplifying your insights, actions, designs, collaborations and spiritual capacities.

How to Optimize the Impact of Integral City Work
How to Optimize Integral City Impact Through Adult Development
How to Optimize Integral City Impact by Getting Ideas Out Into the World
How to Optimize Impact of Integral City Work from Direct Experience & Deep Wisdom
How to Optimize Integral City Impact through Transconventional Religion
How to Optimize Integral City Impact with Community of Practice
How to Optimize Integral City Impact as Spiritual Practice
How to Optimize Integral City Impact as Accomplice to the Divine

Is Superordinate Goal the Gift of Covid19?

In our VUCA world, confused and confounded by the rapid global spread of covid19, we may be viewing the unexpected emergence of a superordinate goal that is quickly aligning a plurality of nations, cities, citizens and experts to work together for survival.

A superordinate goal (a term coined by Dr. Don Beck, co-author of Spiral Dynamics) is a goal that transcends and includes multiple other goals so that all stakeholders work together. This empowering alignment has the capacity to resolve often contradictory, opposing and polarized factions. A superordinate goal is the anchor, attractor and energizer for the emergence of a Meshwork.

Ironically , to wake up the world to the superordinate goal, it has taken a disease that threatens the practical, political and personal survival of individuals and collectives. As the covid19disease spreads, takes its tolls and stretches all our resourcefulness, a veil is parting that reveals our need to cooperate and collaborate to survive this microbial threat. More than that, as it travels is it revealing the necessity for us to honour universal ONEness, our vast interconnectedness and our need to align strategies, resources and compassion on multiple levels of complexity?

As I write this newsletter, I am involved  in the Findhorn Community’s response to strengthening our personal and collective immunity. We continue in service to the health of our Planet and the transformation of our being/doing/relating/co-creating courses and activities. However, even as we affirm our service to Life, Love and Learning, we have made difficult decisions to close down our classes and cease operations for 2 months. We respond both proactively to our own decisions for community wellbeing, as well as the National Health Service guidelines and federal edits. At the same time, we are faced with economic questions about supporting our co-workers, the wider community and assisting our most vulnerable.

Simultaneously, we also invest ever more intentionally in the practices that are our strengths: Deep Inner Listening, Co-creating with the Intelligences of Nature, Work as Love in Action, Living Roots of Community and Attunement to Collective Consciousness. All of these ways of being give us an Overview of Wholeness and how we can serve Wellbeing – cosmically, globally and locally.

On one level witnessing the covid19 challenges to both our local conditions and our worldwide systems provokes a personal retrospective of all the disasters I have experienced – and survived –  in my lifetime.

Let me count the ways: polio epidemic, prairie blizzards, Caribbean hurricanes, Fraser delta floods, Y2K technology bug, 911 World Trade Centre, SARS, Avian Flu, 2008 Financial Crisis US, 2010 Financial Crisis EU, Climate COPS (+++), Forest Fires (BC, California, Australia, Brazil).

From some perspectives, I feel that I have been preparing all my life for this moment. As a teenager I was inoculated by Ayn Rand’s Objectivist Theory and bleak condemnation of the impacts of communism. From those young days till now, I can’t remember all the times that I have prepared emergency supplies of food, water, currency and shelter. I am deeply grateful that the very resilience of society, community, family and self have enabled survival till now.

It is a comfort and inspiration to be in a community where we have expertise and energy ready to cooperate and collaborate in a multitude of ways: creating a situation committee; diarizing our daily contacts; mapping our disease incidence; contacting the most vulnerable; volunteering to help; communicating our responses; controlling our food consumption; planning for food production and distribution; experimenting with “take-outs” instead of “eat-ins”; offering zoom and video conferencing within the community to stay connected; connecting on Social Media with the rest of the world.

In short, I am amazed at the effectiveness of the covid19 threat to catalyze a superordinate goal around which cooperation and collaboration appears to be happening around the world. Essentially, I see us enacting the Master Code of Care – for Self/Others/Place/Planet. Furthermore, I notice that we are Thinking Cosmically. Feeling Globally. Acting Locally (as Jude Currivan propounds).

And I am curious what are the qualities of this situation that quickened the system so swiftly, when the decades of scientific evidence, activist pleading and an infinity of efforts around Climate Change could not align us? Is it as simple as the threat’s Time is right Now? It’s Space of impact is right Here (personally)? It’s Moral Influence is Everyone?

Are those the qualities that make the Superordinate Goal irresistible, irrefutable and inevitable?

VUCA World – Contact or Contract?

Contract can mean “to confirm an agreement” or “to reduce/diminish/withdraw in size”. In the English language it is ambiguous, paradoxical and ironic that the same word can mean both a positive affirming energy and a negative declining energy.

In the VUCA world of a pandemic like covid19 both meanings of the word “contract” are in play. As the world is being given orders to stop contact, the daily contracts we depend on as implicit agreements that govern dependable life conditions are being broken or denounced. In shock and/or defiance it is natural for us to contract and hunker down into protective positions.

Thus, we are experiencing the tensions that arise from simultaneously experiencing both meanings of “contract”. And when we are told “no contact” is a key strategy for avoiding or slowing the spread of covid19, how are humans to resolve the tensions of contract/contract?

If ever we sought a lived example of VUCA we are now living in global scale times of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. VUCA is no longer a military term – it is becoming the only way we can describe our daily realities.

Ironically the official responses to covid19, of isolation and quarantine may elicit the counter-response of community caring and compassion. Because, although the death rate seems high (by comparison to common flu but lower than SARS) the virus is likely to visit most communities and the only way we will be able to counteract all the downturns is to bring together the 4 Voices and enact the Master Code of Care – regardless of what the government/official edicts say.

In the middle of difficult times, the best policy is always the Truth. And that seems to be the most challenging behaviour for our officials to deliver.

While it may be a natural (defensive) reaction to contract in the face of attack, the lessons of the bees and the 4 voices is to do exactly the opposite – we should be in contact with one another. Connecting and reassuring and serving and caring engender positive psychology which is the greatest support we can give our immune systems. Fortuitously our technology allows us to connect without physical contact – and for a time we must practise social distancing physically but use the video/audio options that enable our mirror neurons to respond to the body language of our family, friends, neighbours, colleagues and even our officials.

—

When I face such wellbeing-defying conundrums in our Human Hive, I turn to Nature and ask myself, “What would the bees do in this VUCA world? What are they doing?”

The bees, who have been around for 100 million years, continue to serve their eco-regions by pollinating plants – thus providing energy to feed their hives this year and create renewed energy for next year.

Their numbers may have been diminished but their strategies continue – because they are life-giving strategies.

Humans on the other hand are facing challenges that bees have already had to contend with in the long history of their species – viral infection, climate change and species differentiation.

Much of human attention has been resistant to recognizing the implications of climate change – because it is not equally distributed around the world. Thus, some countries have refused to change policies to reduce climate impacts.

China has become the world’s largest emitter of CO2. Ironically it is also named as ground zero for the arrival of the coronavirus covid19. China’s draconian measures to contain the spread of the virus by locking down Wuhan city and Hubei province has unexpectedly revealed the scale and source of the emission. As a result, an unexpected (?) side effect has been their skies have cleared of both pollution and the CO2 emissions. The count of both industrial outputs has reduced in a way measurable from space.

Covid19 is spreading around the world with consequences that can easily spawn conspiracy theories. Is it possible that the countries that have defied world demands that they cease or change their military intimidation strategies, may not have the requisite level of complex thinking that is prepared to make choices between military strategies, capital investments and prevention or containment of the virus?

We are watching the inevitable lack of resilience in the world of autocracies:

Iran having the highest contagion and death rate in the middle east.
North Korea firing rockets while apparently hundreds of its military are infected and dying from covid19.
Italy and Spain closing the country’s borders because of the rate of infection and deaths.

While it has been easy for many country leaders (of all governance stripes) to mock the reality of climate change, the rapidity with which covid19 is spreading is revealing that he/she who mocks first may not mock at all in the long run. More than one doubting politician or even minister in Italy, UK, USA, Australia has been quarantined after a positive diagnosis.

The ripple effects of the virus’ rapid spread have touched the energy resource sector resulting in market drops that now eclipse the stock market plunge of 2008.

Could there possibly be a silver-lining to this contracted/no contact situation? As Life would have it, we may be living through such a level of dissonance that we have created the conditions for a Superordinate Goal and a Meshwork stragegy to emerge. (Explore this with me in the next blog and Newsletter.)

Riding the Wave of Death & Dying to Wellbeing

Elizabeth Kübler-Ross drew the curve of Death and Dying in a way many of us recognize all change happens. Her curve maps the Change Process of Spiral Dynamics. It is the same cycle that Otto Scharmer uses for the U Theory. It is the same pattern I designed for Integral City Book 2 using Placecaring and Placemaking to mark the right and left-hand sides of the curve.

As we ride the wave of covid19 we are experiencing the stages of grief that Kübler-Ross marked out – Denial, Anger, Depression, Bargaining, Acceptance.

I would also reflect our variations of the same curve could include: Fear/Withdrawal, Resistance, Anger, Bargaining, Acceptance, Enactment, Release, New Story.

In 1999 I worked with friend and colleague, Jan Nickerson to co-create a board game – Y2K Connections – Cocreating Community not Crises. We took our game and our learning to ASTD 2000 in a workshop we called “Y2K – The World’s First Global Learning Experience”.

The metaphor that we used was the Butterfly life cycle from Egg to Caterpillar to Chrysalis to Butterfly. That metaphor has become in many ways a global meme for the learning cycle that opens us up to the experience of the maps of Death & Dying, the Change Curve, the U-Theory and the emergence of a new Earth Story.

Recognizing the pattern of these fractal change curves reflects our current global experience might reassure us that we have been here before and survived. This passage through Life and Death to a Renewal/Renaissance  reveals the pattern of a meta-view that can reassure us that we can survive.

This is a time to gather the 4 Voices of the City and ask ourselves:

What do we need to let go of?
What do we need to stop resisting?
What must we accept?
What can we celebrate? Strengthen?
How can we cooperate/collaborate?
How can we prototype a New Story?
How do we Think Cosmically? Feel Globally? Act Locally?

Because if our species don’t take these questions as a guide to learning a new way of being in the world, we may not be well in the world … in any way we would currently recognize as wellbeing.