I am at the end of Chapter 3 – The Thriving Impulse. Beginning with my June 13, 2012 post, Pause for evolutionary understanding, I asked this question: where do we need to put our attention to ride out our evolutionary burst successfully?
To begin, I explored some theoretical frameworks to shed some light on our evolutionary relationship with cities. I looked first at Spiral Dynamics with a primer, the principles that frame the Spiral and the conditions that guide evolutionary expansion. We grow and develop – evolve – in response to our life conditions. We evolve with our habitat in all aspects of our lives. We have within us an evolutionary impulse to thrive.
From this point, I choose to explore Dr. Marilyn Hamilton’s 12 evolutionary intelligences one at a time. As I concluded this process, I realized that I can summarize these 12 evolutionary intelligences in one sentence:
Seeing the whole city as alive, evolving wholes that need nourishment allows us to navigate toward cities that serve citizens well, and citizens that serve cities well.We see the whole city with integral maps, such as the nesting holarchy of city systems and Spiral Dynamics integral; the four quadrants and scalar, fractal relationships. The four integral quadrants of the city allow us to see the city’s inner intelligence (our conscious capacity and psychological well-being), outer intelligence (embodying right action and biological well-being), building intelligence (creating structures that flex and flow, and our social well-being) and cultural intelligence (feeding each other and cultural well-being).
Thinking of cities as alive draws on our ecosphere intelligence and our living intelligence. Seeing cities as evolving wholes draws on our emerging intelligence and our evolving intelligence. And just like any living entity, cities need nourishment. Cities and citizens thrive with inquiry intelligence and meshworking intelligence.
Our navigating intelligence allows us to declare a destination and notice if we are on track. Ultimately, I believe we are aiming for cities that serve citizens well – and citizens that serve cities well.
This work is about thriving. This is work that never ends.
This post wraps up Chapter 3 – The Thriving Impulse AND it also wraps up the first Part of Nest City. Part One – City Patterns has looked at three impulses in the human species: the city impulse, the planning impulse and the thriving impulse. My next post will recap the patterns in our relationship with cities before switching gears and tackling how we can organize ourselves, and our nest cities, for emergence.
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If you are interested in learning more about evolutionary intelligences relating to cities, you will be interested in the Integral City eLaboratory – Co-Creating the Future of the Human Hive.