Cities – platform for never-ending journey

 

Our work to improve our cities is a very personal journey, both as individuals and as collectives. This is not a journey that is meant to end and it is full of uncertainty. Over the last two months I have been sharing pieces of Chapter 4 – An Uneasy Journey, the first chapter of the second part of the book I am working on: Nest City: The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities. Here are the highlights of the ground I have covered:

  1. Planning as we have is a dinosaur move.  It is essential to notice that our context is always changing. Not noticing is hazardous to our health.
  2. Our cities are perpetually unfinished because we are always learning.
  3. Cities are meant to make us feel uneasy. The human species is on a journey – as an act of travel and as an act of learning. At this point in our journey, cities are our the habitat we have made for ourselves.
  4. Our cities are itching for improvement. We are on a quest for improvement, which means we must scratch the itch. We must explicitly explore what is bothering us.
  5. Tension is an evolutionary driver of cities. The tension we feel between what we have and what we could have – improvement – is hard to live with yet essential to our evolution.
  6. As we welcome and seek deeper knowing, we invite uneasiness. Scratching the itch is what generates new ways of to think, make and do things, the source of the city impulse itself.
  7. Our social habitat is key our journey in cities.  It is time to choose to bring out the best in us, supporting each of us individually and collectively in the discomfort we find when we scratch the itch.
Cities are the habitat we have created for ourselves on a journey that will take us to unknown places and potentials.  Our cities are our platform for future growth.  The better we tend ourselves, the better we tend them.  The better we tend them, the better we tend ourselves.

My next post will recap 10 practices that have been articulated here, that support our uneasy journey in cities.  

 

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This post forms part of Chapter 4 – An Uneasy Journey, of Nest City: The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities.

Nest City is organized into three parts, each with a collection of chapters.  Click here for an overview of the three parts of Nest City.  Click here for an overview of Part 2 – Organizing for Emergence, chapters 4-7.

 

 

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