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Integral City

Contributors: Marilyn Hamilton and Jim Garrison

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Marilyn Hamilton, author of Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive, talks with Jim Garrison about applying the integral model to city design and development, emphasizing the important roles that the cities of the world have to play in responding to the climate change crisis.

A Brief History: Marilyn offers a quick summary of her own eclectic background, her introduction to Ken Wilber's Integral approach, and her growing concern for humanity's relationship with the environment.
The Invisible City: A city is more than the sum of its systems—it is more than steel, concrete, and asphalt, more than zoning laws, traffic patterns, and power grids. Some of the most important aspects of a city are the qualities we cannot see: all the cultural worldviews, personal beliefs, and hidden meanings that cannot be quantified, only experienced.
One Size Does Not Fit All: Marilyn emphasizes the fact that we cannot take an overly generalized approach to integral city design, as each individual city is uniquely situated geographically, politically, and culturally, presenting very different challenges from city to city.
The Human Hive: Today's cities represent an astonishing concentration of human resources, activities, values, and motivations—and as these dimensions of urban life continue to evolve, so do our cities. Now that we have the technology and the philosophy to recognize our intrinsic wholeness, how will our cities adapt to the needs of the 21st century?
The 1-2-3 of Urban Care: Marilyn outlines the ethical imperative required by citizens, engineers, developers, managers, planners, and the like, which she summarizes as "take care of yourself, take care of each other, and take care of this place."
The New Cuban Revolution: Jim and Marilyn talk about the fairly surprising case study Havana, Cuba offers to the sustainability discussion, having been forced by a variety of geo-political realities to change their approach to energy policy, transportation, food production, education, etc.

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Marilyn Hamilton

Dr. Marilyn Hamilton PhD, CGA is the founder of Integral City Meshworks Inc, www.integralcity.com and TDG Global Learning Connections. She uses the integral framework to design change in the city that is ecologically informed and operationally integrated. She is the author of Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive.

Jim Garrison

Jim Garrison is the chairman and president of the State of the World Forum, which he cofounded with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1995. The State of the World Forum (SWF) is often thought of as a "shadow UN," in that it is the largest forum of world leaders outside of the United Nations. From Margaret Thatcher to Ted Turner, from the Queen of Jordan to Desmond Tutu, from Jimmy Carter to George Bush Sr., all have been part of the extraordinary dialogue that is the State of the World Forum.

About Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive

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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?

From the Back Cover:

Evolving city intelligences multiply and integrate all city capacities

"Dr. Marilyn Hamilton introduces powerful, new models that uncover the fractals within human nature and probe into the very 'DNA' that shapes human groupings."
Dr. Don Beck, The Spiral Dynamics Group, Global Center for Human Emergence

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 problems? Where do we grow the unexpected connections, that propogate new pathways for community learning and give city leaders and citizens fresh hope?

This book explores a new integral paradigm for cities that answers these questions. It traces the evolution of the city's systematic, strategic, social and systemic intelligences and shows planners, policy makers, citizens, civil society and environmentalists how to sense, experience, relate to and live in the city with an integral consciousness. Exploring the contexts of the city's geography, ecology and lifecycles, Integral City guides the reader on an integrated journey through the city's inner, outer, building and storytelling intelligences. Integral City recalibrates intelligences for life-giving evolution on earth and futures in space.

Chapters explore:

4 meta-maps for city wholeness
12 appreciative inquiries for evolutionary direction
Bio-psycho-cultural-social intelligences for city change
Meshworking strategies for city learning
Integral Vital Signs Monitors for city wellbeing
12 sets of simple rules for complex adaptiveness

Integral City will appeal to anyone interested in creating conditions in which our cities can evolve intelligently beyond the challenges of the 21st century.

"Marilyn Hamilton amazes us with the depth and breadth of her vision, her mastery of the integral paradigm, and her pragmatic suggestions for creating cities of the future."
Dr. Nancy Roof, Founding Editor, Kosmos Journal.

"Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive is a powerful application of the "meta-theory" of integral philosophy."
Steve McIntosh author of Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution

"...a veritable eco city-region planning and design manifesto for anyone whose business touches on any aspect of city-making, city-managing and city-sustaining."
Ian Wight PhD, Associate Professor of City Planning, Faculty of Architecture, University of Manitoba

Dr. Marilyn Hamilton is a "meshworker" and founder of Integral City, creating conditions for the emergence of healthy ecologies in people systems. She has over 25 years of international experience catalyzing community and organizational change and has written numerous books.