Nest City’s second part

 

Nest City is in three parts.  Part 1 looks at new ways to see patterns a cities that take into account the city’s complexity.  Part 2 proposes ways to organize ourselves to see those patterns and use them.  Part 3 articulates how to integrate the organizing patterns to co-create cities that serve us well.

Part One – City Patterns is behind us.  (Until I add more!)  It articulates the evolutionary relationship between humans and our habitat – our cities.  We have a distinct impulse to build cities, organize them and thrive in them.

Part Two – Organizing for Emergence is next.  It will explore our organizing patterns: we organize to reach a destination, we experience uncertainty along the way, and the future that comes to pass is something unexpected at every turn.  I will show you how the nest works: destination, journey and emergence.

Part Three – Nest City, will integrate these elements of destination, journey and emergence.  I will show you a second level of ‘nestworks’ that articulates how our city making and civic practice relate to the city that is emerging.  And of course a sweet spot where it all comes together.

Here’s another way to look at Nest City and  how it is organized: John O’Donohue’s blessing below.

The first five lines capture Part One.  As linear as we think the creation of cities is, it is always unfolding.  There may be patterns in cities, but they are emerging.  We do  not know exactly what they will be like.

Part Two is captured with the text beginning with the words, ‘Often we only know it is time to change’, through to the line, ‘Into the unknown that beckons us;’.  We often know it is time to change but we can not put our fingers on what needs to change.  We feel uneasy but we are not sure why.  We lose track of our destination and may be adrift, yet there is always something unknown that beckons us.

Part Three acknowledges, as the rest of the blessing does, that we are called to offer great trust in the unknown.  We know, quite deeply in our very souls, that we can move beyond the confinements we confine ourselves with, and unleash our soul’s desire.

I wonder what our collective souls’ desire.  I wonder what the city’s soul desires.


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