Integral City

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 that 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? For City Leaders, Business/Innovators, the 3rd Sector and Citizens, this book proposes 5 sets of City Intelligences: Contexting, Individual, Collective, Strategic, and Evolutionary. It explores a new paradigm that senses, experiences, relates, and co-creates in-with and as the city-using an Integral consciousness. Integral City recalibrates city intelligences with the Master Code of Care-for Self, Others, Place, and Planet. Its life-giving strategies reveal cities as Gaia's Reflective Organs, evolving futures in space.

How do you inquire about, act in and impact the city as self, other and place? This is a book of: burning questions that deepen your reflective capacity; injunctions that guide your practice as a city AQtivator; and frames for designing impact on, with and as the city. Learn through a series of methodological cases studies and templates for process designs, based on Integral City work in the last decade. If you want to achieve impact in your work as Integral City Practitioner, Catalyst or Meshworker, these designs generate outcomes in the city as a whole, using an integrally framed approach. You can address consciousness and culture as Place Caring (the left had quadrants of the integral model) and actions and systems as Place Making (the right hand quadrants of the integral model). Organized using the Integral City design cycle the chapters walk you through processes for inviting in the Knowing Field; embracing the Master Code; assessing the 12 Intelligences of the City; discovering and mapping City Values; designing Vital Signs Monitors; engaging the 4 Voices of the City; Prototyping designs for Learning Lhabitats, Pop-ups and Sustainable Community Development; Meshworking Purpose, People, Place and Planet; and Evaluating Outcomes. Using these process designs you may choose a linear or a non-linear path. Whether you focus on separate stages or attempt the whole tour, you will find an inquiry-action-impact system that is replicable, frequently iterative and provides a grand cycle for enacting change at the city scale.

Integral City 3.7 considers a series of apparently intractable challenges that all cities face because the world has become so complex that cause and effect are rarely directly linked. This third book in our series explores three themes that are eternal practices for designing a collective life that works for all life; namely, Caring, Contexting and Capacity Building. The challenges cities face today result from the intertwining impacts of multiple life conditions, perspectives and capacities and can only be addressed by reframing them within an Integral City model that honors the plural realities, recognizes their developmental and evolutionary relationships and does not conflate differences. Book 3 applies and expands in multiple directions the 12 intelligences described in Book 1, Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive and builds on the field work described in Book 2: Integral City Inquiry & Action: Designing Impact for the Human Hive.