It’s time to boil down the philosophical theory of evolutionary progress and purpose after yesterday’s heavy post on instrumental and intrinsic purpose. What does this ‘big’ thinking mean to how we look our cities and our relationship with them?
Steve McIntosh, on whom I draw heavily for this exploration of purposes at different scales, offers the language of instrumental and intrinsic purposes when looking at evolution at a macro scale. I take some liberties today to think about what this means for our cities. I’m zooming in, perhaps closer than McIntosh would, so the limb I am venturing out on is my own.
This diagram is an oversimplification of scales at work in the city, but consider the red circles as citizens and the yellow circle as the city – the habitat we build for ourselves. The yellow circle, the city, is made up of many whole entities, from organizations to families and citizens. An increasing number of cities on Earth now have more than one million whole entities – citizens -in them. (See the post that starts the Nest City book posts: are people growing cities or are cities growing people?)
In our city habitat, the large whole/holon is the city. It is made of millions of smaller wholes/holons that are both wholes and parts at the same time. If you imagine the red circles as citizens, consider them as whole entities that form part of city. Just as the cells that make up our body are instrumental to our existence, citizens are instrumental to the existence of the city. Without citizens there is no city, and when we change our habits, we change our cities.
Citizens are fundamental to the creation of cities. Cities, in turn, are significant and have an intrinsic, essential value. When we start to notice what the essential value of cities is for us, we start to see a different relationship between us and our city habitat. The essential role of the city is its role in our very evolution; while we create cities they in turn are helping create us. And so on.
Simply by looking at the intrinsic value of cities, our role in them becomes increasingly instrumental. To organize for our own emergence, we need to consciously organize ourselves at the scale of instrumental citizens and an intrinsic city. Our work at this time is to figure out what it means to consciously play a role in both the well-being of cities and citizens.
If citizens are not well, then our cities can not be well. And if our cities are not well, then we will not be well. It seems easy to recognize this as a vicious circle where we are helpless, but I choose to look at this appreciatively. Our cities emerge from us, we can look at this as a virtuous circle, where we choose to create what we wish to create.
If we are the building blocks for our cities, what kind of building blocks do we choose to be?
What do we choose to build?
_____ _____ _____
This post forms part of Chapter 5 – Destination Alive or Adrift, of Nest City: The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities. Click here for an overview of Chapters 4-7 (Part 2 – Organizing for Emergence). Click here for an overview of the three parts of Nest City.
At the beginning of December 2012, I began exploring the role of purpose and destination as we organize our cities with this question: is our destination alive or adrift? In Focus, learn and choose, I share a personal reflection on the role of purpose as I was struggling with the increased darkness as we approach the winter solstice; when things are feeling adrift, I sense a higher purpose that connects me to my work.
As a species, our work shapes what we emerge into yet the very purpose of evolution is evolving. What is constant, however, is our quest for survival and improvement; humans, and the settlements we create, share this quest. I came across 100 urban trends that highlight the emerging destination of our cities. While this list of highlights are not definitive, they do elucidate a trajectory in our cities’ development. They demonstrate that there is direction in destination.
Just as I may feel adrift in my personal work, so too can our cities. Teasing out the direction in which we wish to go is as important as a specific destination. These are two different scales of purpose, perhaps, where destination is specific and in the short term, while direction is more difficult to latch onto an essential element in our quest to improve. Understanding what constitutes improvement points us in a direction. And as we move in a direction, the purposes that show up as specific destinations along the way evolve.
As the purpose of evolution is evolving, so to are the purposes of our cities. I see a nest of purposes for the city (Figure A) that manifest at various scales, from the self, to family/clan, group/tribe, neighbourhood/organization, city, and eco-region (Figure B).
Figure A: Nest of city purposesFigure B: Hamilton’s nested hierarchy of city systems
Each scale of individuals and collectives, are reaching, as interested and able, into expanded purposes (Figure C). A range of purposes are alive at every scale, from the individual to the city, to the planet and universe; even purposes we can not yet contemplate and imagine. Each purpose is in response to context and circumstances and are therefore always in flux. As life conditions change, we are pulled down the Spiral to ensure survival, and we are pulled up the Spiral as we aim to improve.
Figure C: Spiral of purposes
This all takes place as a dance between our individual and collective lives, and especially in the co-creative dance where we built our physical, social and economic habitats together: the city.
A city’s destination is to serve the evolution of our evolving purposes.
What purposes are alive in you? In your city?
What purposes are you and your city expanding into?
_____ _____ _____
This post forms part of Chapter 5 – Destination Alive or Adrift, of Nest City: The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities. Click here for an overview of Chapters 4-7 (Part 2 – Organizing for Emergence). Click here for an overview of the three parts of Nest City.
The Spiral is based on the work of Clare Graves, Don Beck and Christopher Cowan: Spiral Dynamics.
I am sneaking back into the digital world today after a winter rest of digital darkness that began on December 20, 2012. I stopped blogging and stepped away from the variety of social media in which I participate.
As I dive back into the digital aspect of my life today I notice that my ‘dark’ time was spent connecting to my habitat.
On the first day of darkness, I met the sun at the edge of a nearby riverbank for my morning practice. I bid the sun goodnight with a cross-country ski from along the river in the heart of my city. I took walks through my city, exploring Christmas lights in neighbourhoods and trails in creek valleys. The wonder of winter in my physical habitat is alive.
My dark time also brought my social habitat alive, while building a gingerbread house, gathering for Christmas parties with friends and family. Many gatherings also connected us to our physical place – we tobogganed on New Year’s Eve in the moonlight, downhill skied in the Rocky Mountains, and had a birthday party on the lake my family has enjoyed for decades.
A winter rest, leaning into the darkness of the season, fuels my inner being. My physical place feeds me. Exercise and fresh air feeds me. Time to float and lightly contemplate the world feeds me. Social time with friends and family, steeped in culture and tradition feeds me. A winter rest with time alone and with others, both active and inactive, allows me to be well for me and for others.
My soul has found more solid ground, prepared to start a new year with renewed vigor for my work.
The purposes I pursue are informed by what I value. The purposes we pursue are informed by what we value. Purpose and value drives both my decisions and those of the larger wholes of which I am a part.
I am a whole system myself, and I find myself within the larger whole of my family. My family is a system within the larger system of our neighbourhood. My neighbourhood is a system inside the larger system of the city of Edmonton and its region. Edmonton is a system within the larger system of Canada, and Canada a nation of the world. Each system is whole and is also a part of larger wholes. Each system has its respective purpose and set of values, which may be aligned or disparate, but they each are live with purpose.
Figure A: Hamilton’s nested city systems
Each scale will have a purpose that reflects its life conditions. (See Figure B to see the Spiral; here is a primer on Spiral Dynamics.) While I value prosperity and creative entrepreneurship today (with the time I have to write), I recognize that the school and police systems in Edmonton are operating out of authority and moral codes today because of two teens who threatened, online, to hurt many people. Their actions have been taken seriously and they have been charged. Organizations across Edmonton are diving in to make financial contributions to the Edmonton Food Bank to ensure families have enough food this Christmas. They are guided by moral codes to serve folks in survival mode.
And as we gather for upcoming winter festivities, whatever religion, we are engaging in long-held practices that bring communities together to bond for collective survival of culture. Others in my city are working on open data systems that help the city see itself, so we are able to explore more fully the diversity of knowledge at our disposal. Others yet see ways to make all of the above be healthy and vibrant, so we have a city that serves citizens well.
Figure B: Spiral of purposes
A variety of purposes are alive at every scale, from the individual to the city to the planet and the Universe. Each scale of individuals and collectives, are reaching, as interested and able, into expanded purposes.
What purposes are alive in you? In your city?
What purposes are you and your city expanding into?
_____ _____ _____
This post forms part of Chapter 5 – Destination Alive or Adrift, of Nest City: The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities. Click here for an overview of Chapters 4-7 (Part 2 – Organizing for Emergence). Click here for an overview of the three parts of Nest City.
The Spiral is based on the work of Clare Graves, Don Beck and Christopher Cowan: Spiral Dynamics.
If the work we do creates our cities, and if, as individuals, we lose our sense of purpose in our work, so do our cities. If we lose track of where we are going, then the very cities we build that support us on our journey have lost track too.
Last week I started to post “book bits” from Chapter 5 – Destination Alive or Adrift, with these key questions:
What is the role of ‘purpose’ in a city?
What makes a city alive?
How can we tell when we are adrift?
How does the purpose of our individual work connect to the purpose of the city?
How, exactly, does our work matter?
Before diving into these questions, a quick touch on purpose and its relationship to evolution.
The work we do is powered by improvement, what we are aiming for when we “scratch the itch”, when we choose to look for ways to fix what is bothering us, or what could simply be better. We have a drive to improve the quality of our lives. Steve McIntosh, in his new book Evolution’s Purpose, sheds some light on this phenomenon.
We are moved to improve our conditions and this takes place in a self-other dialectic:
…as we are moved to make things better, we inevitably encounter the ever-present dialectic of self and other, which shows up whenever we set out to improve our conditions (p. 154).
We pursue self-improvement and give to wider community:
…our ability to grow and continuousely make things better is predicated on the pursuit of both self-improvement and the giving of ourselves to the larger community (p. 154).
An evolutionary influence is at work:
…as we increasingly experience and understand this developmental impetus, we can perhaps sense that we are encountering an ancient and even sacred influence. This is an evolutionary impulse, the ultimate source of creativity in the universe (p. 155).
McIntosh makes the case that “grow and thrive as individuals over the long term, we not only have to take care of ourselves, we also have to provide service to something larger than ourselves (p. 154).” The dialectic between what our current state and the one we desire, akrasia, takes place with another critical dialectic, that of the relationship between individuals and the collective.
The role of science and philosophy, and even spirituality, are explored at length by McIntosh. I refer anyone interested in the argument that evolution has a purpose to McIntosh’s work; it is well laid out.
For this post, it suffices to note that evolution has a purpose of some kind that is co-created by the agency of humanity. Since cities are our creation, they are part of this dynamic. In fact, one of the forms of the individual-collective dialectic described by McIntosh is the relationship between citizen and city.
As we dive into exploring the destination of our city journey, this realization, by McIntosh, is essential:
… as we are moved by evolution, as we growing our ability to experience and create intrinsic value, we come to see how the purpose of evolution itself is still evolving – it cannot be discerned with finality because it is still in the process of being determined by the beings whose choices are required for its creation (emphasis mine, p. 161).
We don’t know where exactly we are going, but we have a hand in where we are going. We don’t know exactly where we will go with our cities, but we have a hand in where they will take us.
Where do we choose to go?
If our work shapes where we go, what work do we choose?
_____ _____ _____
This post forms part of Chapter 5 – Destination Alive or Adrift, of Nest City: The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities. Click here for an overview of Chapters 4-7 (Part 2 – Organizing for Emergence). Click here for an overview of the three parts of Nest City.
When we lose our sense of purpose in our work, we drift. This is no different for our cities; when we have no idea what our city’s purpose is it can drift too. This post is the first in a series to explore the role of purpose, or ‘destination’, as we organize ourselves in cities. Does knowing our purpose have an impact on our ability to be fully alive?
As I get into this exploration, here is an excerpt from John O’Donohue’s blessing that serves as a supportive thread for Nest City, “For the Time of Necessary Decision”:
Perhaps the work we do has lost its soulOr the love where we once belongedCalls nothing alive in us anymoreWe drift through this gray, increasing nowhere
The work we do creates our cities, and if we lose our sense of purpose in our work, so do our cities. If we lose track of where we are going, so do our cities, the very habitat we build to help us get there.
Here is the terrain I expect to cover over the next few weeks:
What is the role of ‘purpose’ in a city?
What makes a city alive?
How can we tell when we are adrift?
How does the purpose of our individual work connect to the purpose of the city?
How exactly, does our work matter?
Do you have any responses to these questions before I get started?
_____ _____ _____
This post forms part of Chapter 5 – Destination Alive or Adrift, of Nest City: The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities. Click here for an overview of Chapters 4-7 (Part 2 – Organizing for Emergence). Click here for an overview of the three parts of Nest City.
A few weeks ago, as I was walking through my city, right in the middle of it, I came across a bold and wild coyote. We stopped and looked at each other for a bit, but as I looked away for a moment to put my hand on my phone for a picture, it vanished. It was a wonderful reminder of how the city is in relationship with its region ecologically as well as socially and economically.
The coyote is an example of how the wild reaches into the city. Wild animal life reaches into the city, either straight in across the land or through the tentacles of rivers and the natural landscape. The wild also flies overhead, or burrows underground. We are surrounded by the wild.
The city itself reaches out beyond its boundaries into the wild. The development of the oil sands in northern Alberta’s boreal forest is an example of the city reaching out into the wild. This development is taking place because of our energy demands around the world, which in so many ways are related to city life.
Our vast network of settlements, large and small are in relationship with each other and the wild. As settlements began, the relationship with the wild was very explicit: food supply, resource extraction for trade, transportation routes, etc. Over time, what our cities offer other cities and citizens evolves. An article in today’s Edmonton Journal on the new Kaye Edmonton Clinic is a prime example:
The influence of the clinic is far beyond Edmonton. People who come from a significant distance will have the potential to do many things with one trip ~ Dr. Dylan Taylor.
Each city is in relationship with far more than the citizens within its boundaries. The Kaye Edmonton Clinic will serve citizens in the Edmonton area as well as northern Alberta, Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories. This facility’s reach is far beyond its host city; in fact, it reaches into the wild.
The wild reaches in and the city reaches out.
Where is the wild in your city?
How does your city reach out into the wild?
_____ _____ _____
Interested in urban coyotes? Check out the Edmonton Urban Coyote Project, a study out of the University of Alberta about coyote habitat, coyote diet and the knowledge and perceptions of residents about coyotes. It seems that coyotes have been inhabiting cities across North America at increasing rates over the last 20 years. They are in Los Angeles, New York, Austin, Toronto, Chicago, Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton.
Does having a destination in mind make the journey any easier? While there is so much to say about the uneasiness we experience in our evolutionary journey with cities, it is time to look more closely at the role of ‘destination’ in our journey. We organize our cities; do we have some kind of destination in mind?
It seems that having some sense of direction is key as we organize for emergence, but do we have a sense of direction? Are we on a journey with a destination or are we adrift?
We are living in a culture of extreme advocacy, of confrontation, of judgment, and of verdict. Discussion has given way to debate. Communication has become a contest of wills. Public talking has become obnoxious and insincere. Why? Maybe it’s because deep down under the chatter we have come to a place where we know that we don’t know… anything. But nobody’s willing to say that.John Patrick Stanley *
Over the course of the last series of posts, pieces of Chapter 4 – An Uneasy Journey, I argue that our cities are a platform for our never-ending journey. It is not an easy journey, but it enables us to grow and learn together. I identify 10 practices that help us travel in this uneasy fashion, rather than fight it.
As I dive into sharing parts of Chapter 5 – Destination Alive or Adrift, here are some plot helpers for Nest City: The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities, the book that I am sharing here while I search for a publisher:
Embracing our cities as part of our personal and collective learning journey requires practice. It is not easy work, yet it is essential. Here are some practices we can engage in with self, each other, and our cities to enable ourselves and our cities to be the best they can be:
Notice y(our) response to the unknown. No matter how hard and smart we work, we can not shake the unknown. The more conscious we are of our inner worlds, the better we are able to serve ourselves, others and our cities well.
Notice if it is time for change. An essential practice is noticing if the conditions are right for change. If not, be patient, if yes, seek out the ways to influence the conditions for change.
Organize for emergence – fractally. At every scale, from self to planet, we can choose to organize well by sorting out our destination, embracing our learning journey and allowing the city we need to emerge.
Allow cities to be as good as they can be. When we put our attention on what we want to fix, to where we are, we stay there. When we put our attention to where we want to go, we move in a new direction.
Perform with purpose. Choose to work with purpose – and with feedback loops that reveal when on/off track. Notice when the wheals are spinning and when there is traction.
Stop and listen – to Self and city. Break the momentum from time to time and check in with Higher Self, seeking alignment with your work. This serves Self and the city.
Use ‘not knowing’ purposefully. Seek out the unknown from a positive-feeling stance for the purposes of learning. Noticing what we do not know helps see wrong decisions, ensure we have the information we need and see what needs to be known.
Create feedback loops. Our city infrastructure is slow to change, but we have the potential to be wonderfully adaptable with that infrastructure. The customized feedback loops emerging with social media are reshaping our view of cities.
Flexibility rules. Rules have a critical role to play in our world. They are at their healthiest when they align with the purpose they are meant to serve. And those purposes are always changing in response to our changing world.
What practices do you use as you participate in the uneasy journey of our cities? What would you add?
_____ ______ ______
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
_____ ______ ______
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.
