I heard this a few times last week: citizens do not want every neighbourhood to be the same; developers do not want every neighbourhood to be the same; city hall employees do not want every neighbourhood to be thesame. Seems everyone thinks that is what we have, and the finger pointing for the reasons why is dramatic.
Recall the four Integral City voices, each with their distinct perspectives and roles as we organize our cities: civic managers, civic builders and developers, citizens and civil society. The civic managers run our public institutions: city hall, schools, health services, etc. The civic builders and developers physically build our cities. Both of these voices make explicit what we need as citizens: they put our intelligence in action by creating organizations that deliver programs, services and physical structures, all of which is to serve citizens. Civil society is the cultural voice of the city.
Each voice plays a valid role in how we organize ourselves. All four are needed. While each voice has myriad perspectives within it, I hear a smattering of citizens, developers and city hall employees all say the same thing: rules have a place, but the wrong rules stifle our ability to create the neighbourhoods we want.
Remember Spiral Dynamics? Our value systems, emanating from each of us, our organizations, our neighbourhoods, our cities, nations and planet, are forever in flux in response to our changing life conditions. It seems there is alignment of values among some portions of the Integral City voices in a call for a recalibration of the ‘rules’ that shape our neighbourhoods, a recalibration of the BLUE vMeme.
Let me be clear – not everyone sees or desires this alignment, but that does not make it less relevant. There are citizens looking for ways to make existing neighbourhoods more interesting and they find that City Hall’s rules get in the way. Developers and builders are looking or ways to build new neighbourhoods, or build new homes in existing neighbourhoods, that respond to the desires of citizens. There are folks working in civil society that wish to better serve the city, and they struggle with this. There are even City Hall employees that are looking for flexibility. Do all these folks share the same intention? We don’t know if they do.
This is the essential work for us in cities if we wish to create cities that serve us well: to clearly see what is we wish to achieve, our destination. When we know what we wish to achieve, then we will know what rules are necessary.
Rules articulate standards and practices necessary to achieve an outcome. Rules only make sense with a purpose in mind. The growing demand for a change in rules indicates a need to declare a new destination. The contrast appears to be a change from rules for certainty to rules for support.
What we want from rules says a lot about us. This is the clash I see in my city: the need for rules to prescribe our future vs. the need for rules to support our emerging, unknown future.
At last week’s workshop with The Natural Step Canada, Awesome Neighbourhoods for a Sustainable City, the Integral City voices together articulated neighbourhoods for which there is no recipe. There are no rules that will give us, with certainty, what we are aiming for.
Rules are needed, however. They play a critical role in guiding what we create, flexing with the changing conditions.
Flexibility rules.
Are the rules in your world aligned with that they aim to do?
_____ ______ ______
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.
We started the day building models of awesome neighbourhoods that contribute to the city’s sustainability. Citizens, developers, civil society and city managers (the four integral voices of the city) worked together to find what makes a neighbourhood look, feel, sound and smell awesome. The models told the stories of what people are hungry for in our cities. Andrea and Daniel, two participants from Workshop 1, summarized the stories. It seems we are looking for neighbourhoods that:
Appeal aesthetically – beautiful buildings, visual diversity, artistic expression and public art, and interaction between buildings, transportation and open space
Generate sustainability – community based energy generation, increased density, and a shift in modes of transportation away from the automobile
Invite – a mix of public and private spaces, places for community activities and gathering, a great place
Meet basic needs – safe and secure, housing for all stages of life, places of worship, health services, schools, mixed land uses and affordability
Model under construction
After having built a neighbourhood and taken guided tours of each other’s neighbourhoods, we settled in to look at our collective work. We noticed that cities are like the Titanic: hard to turn. We explored this metaphor and found it both negative and positive. The Titanic sunk and killed many. We noted that the Titanic was ahead of her time; she represented great progress in that she was something we had never done before. Unlike the Titanic that was unable to turn in time, we see that our cities are turning. They are changing and evolving to be what we need.
Cities are changing and evolving because they are created by us and we are changing and evolving. All of us, as citizens, as the folks that run our public institutions, the people that physically go out to build our city, and our civil society that organizes to live and speak our values and culture, play a role in how much we consciously respond to our surroundings.
We choose to stay in the fun dance hall at the heart of the Titanic, perhaps oblivious to our fate. We choose to dare look out the window or go out on deck for fresh air and a view, looking out for the obstacles that could sink our ship. We each choose, in our Titanic cities, to assume everything is okay or to look for feedback that may require our adaptation. We choose the information we would like to have on our city/ship instrument panel.
Here’s where the iphone fits in: it is a platform for adaptation and customization. It is a source of open, public feedback for our cities. At the workshop, Carmen dreamed of knowing where all the saskatoon berry bushes are in Edmonton. I imagine an iphone app where citizens upload geographic locations, enabling Carmen to harvest her favourite food across the city. In Edmonton we tweet about where the food trucks mysteriously locate each day. We have at our disposal unimaginable opportunities to share our cities with each other. We have, as well, opportunities to share our understanding of whether our cities are serving us well or not. This is the feedback we need to ensure our cities serve us well.
Tour of an awesome public gathering place
No one person or authority builds our cities. We depend on ourselves and others to make sure we organize ourselves to build the ship and that she is sturdy enough for the voyage and flexible enough to meet our needs. We depend on ourselves and others to have appropriate standards and oversight to ensure what we create meets our needs. We depend on ourselves and others to ensure that our cities reflect our evolving values and actively support the well-being of all inhabitants of the city and eco-region.
Our learning journey together revealed to me that cities are slow-turning Titanics that increasingly have inhabitants that create feedback loops. The feedback within our ships/cities, between cities and among our planet of cities is improving. These inhabitants are, from within the ship, creating new ways to turn and power cities so we no longer have the burden of the Titanic as a slow-moving ship heading to disaster. Instead, we have ship that serves us well with a future of iPhonic feedback.
What makes your neighbourhood an awesome part of your sustainable city? What would make it even more awesome?
_____ _____ _____
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.
There is great momentum in being busy, being distracted from who we really are and the possibilities we offer the world. The result is that each of us, and the city habitats we create for ourselves, are not reaching our full potential.
Yesterday’s post, performance with purpose, articulated the phenomenon of performance momentum, were we find ourselves caught in a drive to perform. In this state, we lose track of who we are and the inner passion that drives our work. We lose track of the purpose of our work and dismiss the feedback loops that ensure our work is responsive to the needs around us. The result is work that does not move the self, the organization, or the city forward. There is no improvement; which is itself a fundamentally driver to our work.
To what extent is our work, even new work, blind to our changing habitat?
How would we change how we organize ourselves to consciously choose to create habitats for ourselves that serve our present and evolving needs and desires?
The answers to these questions, or rather the exploration of these questions, are part of the city’s learning journey. How each of us approaches our work has an impact on our cities. How we collectively approach our work has an impact on our cities. The cities we create, in return, have an impact on us. If we are ‘busy’, missing the clues around us, then our cities will also miss the clues and not serve us well. If we need healthy cities, and they are made by us, then we need to be well for cities to be well. The development of our cities is a survival skill.
From time to time, it is essential to stop, to pause and have a look at the deeper inner self, the one that wants to be let out, free in the world. As we each allow our hidden self to emerge, our cities will change to serve us better. As our cities improve, they are creating the conditions for us to be better again.
It is hard to stop and listen – and we need to learn how to do this, for self and the city. David Whyte, in The Three Marriages, has this to say:
… anyone who has spent any time in silence trying to let this deeper hidden self emerge, soon finds it does not seem to respond to the language of coercion or strategy. It cannot be worried into existence. Anxiety actually seems to keep an experience of the deeper self at bay. This hidden self seems reluctant to be listed, categorized, threatened or coerced. It lives beneath our surface tiredness, waiting, it seems, for us to stop.Stopping can be very difficult. It can take exhaustion, extreme circumstances on a wet, snowy mountain ridge or an intimate sense of loss for it to happen Even then we can soon neutralize and isolate the experience, dismissing it as illogical, pretending it didn’t count, then turning back to our surface strengths and chattering away in a false language we have built around our successes. Success can be the greatest barrier to stopping, to quiet, to opening up the radically different form of conversation that is necessary for understanding this larger sense of the self. Our very success can be the cause of greater anxiety for further preservation of our success (p, 154-155).
It seems the opposite of busy, performance momentum is to pause, to stop. The lure of momentum, particularly if it is full of what we perceive as success, makes it difficult to slow down enough to give ourselves an opportunity to notice the purpose of our work, the meaning in our work and our innermost qualities of who we are individually and collectively.
How do you pause and stop to listen to your Self and city habitats?
_____ _____ _____
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.
From 2005 to 2007 I had the best job in the world, full of challenges at a fast pace. I was running the planning and development department for North America’s fastest growing municipality: the Regional Municpality of Wood Buffalo in the heart of Canada’ oil sands. Political, cultural, social, environmental and economic struggles were the norm, and in the middle our municipal government with a little department with few people to do the work that needed to be done. I know now that the whole time there was something bothering me, a little itch that came and went. W. Timothy Gallwey, in The Inner Game of Work, perfectly describes my itch: performance momentum.
Not all movement or action taken in our work actually moves me, or the organization I serve, forward. Gallwey: “There is a kind of activity that most of us are very familiar with that is not done with conscious intent or awareness of purpose. I call it performance momentum.” Most often it is ‘busy’ work, work that makes us look (and feel) like we are doing something of value. We get energized by the adrenalin and even panic to get things done. We get galvanized by the drive to get things done. And we lose sight of purpose and priorities.
I recognize this phenomenon in groups of people and individuals. We each have moments when we have the foot on the gas regardless of whether we have traction, when we assume that having a foot on the gas is always a good thing. We must always check to see if what we do is effective. We need feedback loops and we need to be open to hearing the messages of the feedback loops.
A city, an organization, a person that is intent on doing things – without a clear and conscious purpose – suffers from performance momentum. It could be connected to a need to be doing, or seen to be doing. We collectively create this culture for ourselves and for each other.
When I get caught in performance momentum, I get tired and unable to do the work well for long. Yet stepping out of performance momentum is not a license to not perform. There is certainly work to be done – and work to be done in a timely manner. The catch is knowing if the work taking place is the right thing to do at the right time, recognizing the work’s purpose. It is about working consciously.
I didn’t reach this understanding until I gave myself time and permission to stop and look at what was bothering me – at what and why I was itchy. I started to scratch this itch five years ago, and as usually what happens with an itch, it has become itchier and itchier. My choosing to write and explore is a risk I welcome: I may find relief, or I may find that I set off deeper, longer lasting itches.
So what’s the opposite of performance momentum? Performance with purpose, full of feedback loops that tell us when we are on track. Noticing when we have traction, rather than wheels spinning, is part of our learning journey.
_____ _____ _____
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.
We limit ourselves greatly when we focus on what we have to fix. It keeps us in the here and now, not the better world we have in mind.
Here’s a scenario. Imagine I live east of the Rocky Mountains in Alberta, Canada. Imagine I dream of surfing the ocean waves, an activity I can not do on the prairies. I dream of getting to the West Coast and the Pacific Ocean on the other side of the mountains.
In fix mode, I will try to find ways to spend time in the water here. I might try other sports, I might make do with windy lakes in the summer. I might make periodic trips to the West Coast to surf from time to time. However, if I really want to fulfill my passion of surfing I need to shift from fix mode to something else. I need to find a way to make it happen.
I am not going to get to surfing life on the West Coast if I am making do with what I have. When I am making do, I put all my energy into making do, not making it to where I want to go. Equally, I will not get what I want if I put my energy into complaining about my current situation either. I will not get to where I want to go pondering why it is that I am not there. To get what I want, I have to shift my attention to what I want, in this case life on the West Coast.
Our cities are no different. We recognize that there are many things at which our cities need be better. We complain about traffic, homelessness, energy consumption, housing costs, pollution, etc. There are endless studies underway to analyze why things are the way they are, and solutions to ‘fix’ the problems we are experiencing. What we are missing is most critical – knowing what our cities do really well right now and what we can do to have more of what works. Without knowing this, we are not in relationship with our city habitat. We are not allowing it to serve us well. (As I write this, I realize that if a city wanted to up and move to the West Coast, it can’t. But its inhabitants can. Cities are where we put them, where we want to be, not the other way around.)
Notice where the energy of the city (or any organization for that matter) is focused. Is it on short-term decisions to make short-term course corrections, or is there a focus on where the city is going, looking out further ahead. When riding a bicycle, or driving a car, if focused on the immediate future the ride is jerky. When we look farther ahead, the ride is wiser, smoother. The likelihood of wrong turns is lessened. The likelihood of hitting a pot-hole is lessened. The likelihood of hitting pedestrians or other vehicles is lessened. We move through the world in a safer, wiser way.
Our choices as individuals and collectives shape the city. In the back of my mind, I always ask, what am I allowing? Am I making room for new possibilities to emerge? Am I making way for what I want, what we want, rather than putting my attention and efforts in conscious or unconscious efforts to have more of the same.
Here is the trick with fixing what’s wrong. First, it puts our attention on what is wrong, rather than what we want. It tricks us into thinking that if we just sort ‘this’ out, things will be right. Sounds a bit like a silver bullet, but it leads us to getting more of the same.
When we put our attention to where we are, we stay there. When we put our attention to where we want to go, we move in a new direction.
_____ _____ _____
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.
As I reflect on last Monday’s post, A retreat from the retreat, I realize that my experience is a fractal of the city experience. It is a smaller version of the same thing. I had a sense of where I wanted to go, I had some learning to do along the way, and I ended up somewhere that I could not have predicted. It emerged. Whether I organize as an individual, or as part of an organization or at the scale of a city, nation or planet, we are doing the same thing.
These three aspects of organizing our self and selves are each critical. Without a destination in mind, pulling us along, we don’t go anywhere. The power of knowing that we want to be somewhere other than ‘here’ is essential.
Movement toward that destination is a learning journey that includes both the process by which I see the destination as well as the journey I undertake to get to the destination.
With all of this, we live with great uncertainty in the world. We never know what will come, who we will be in response to what comes and who we will become. As a result, we may never get to an exact destination. Or, we may not get there the way we had planned. Uncertainty requires that we learn along the way. It also means that we don’t know the destination precisely either; it reveals itself over time.
Destination emerges as a result of our learning journey. While it might not be the exact destination aimed for, in hindsight we recognize that we travelled in the right direction. The trip was about moving in a direction, not getting to a specific predetermined destination. This does not undermine the value of having a destination in mind, however. It is the critical element that pulls us into the future we desire.
We have a choice before us about how to live with these three aspects of organizing ourselves. Most significantly, we have a choice to make about how we nurture each of these elements as individuals and collectives. We can create habitats for them to work well with each other. We can create habitats for them to work well with us, organizing ourselves for unknown possibilities of our choosing.
When we work with passion, we feed ourselves joy. We also feed the city joy.
It is up to all of us, whether we work as citizens, civic managers, civil society or city builders and developers, to make the city full of what we want: joy. Each of us, in our own ways, when we chase what we are passionate about make remarkable contributions to our places where we live together. When we are full of freedom, growth and joy, so too are our cities.
When we align ourselves with our work, great cities that serve us well will emerge, because our work is aligned with our true selves. What we give our cities is what we receive in return. We create our cities, which create us. Indifference for indifference. Disdain for disdain. Compassion for compassion.
Freedom, growth and joy for freedom, growth and joy.
Beauty, truth and goodness for beauty truth and goodness.
Full of unknown possibility
_____ _____ _____
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.
Change comes about when it is ready. Not when I am ready, you are ready, or we are ready. When change is ready.
Back in June I noted Beck and Cowan’s six conditions for change: openness to the potential for change, the presence of solutions for the current problems, sufficient dissonance and turbulence with the present, the ability to overcome the barriers within self and others, insight into the patterns in play, and consolidation of understanding that leads to change.
These six conditions are not a recipe; just ‘doing’ these things is not enough to see change, let alone make change happen or last. Beck and Cowan are very clear on this: even if all conditions are met, awakening new ways of thinking MAY happen. It is not a given.
Change is a complex matter. A small action (or realization) may have huge unintended consequences. It is possible that all conditions could be met and no change would take place. There might not be sufficient dissonance, for example. The potential intelligence might not be there. There could be barriers that can not be overcome. It is possible that we are not even able to see and feel what is wrong with the current life conditions, let alone begin to imagine what new possibilities could exist.
When I look at our cities and how we live together, I see that collectively we are experiencing dissonance with how we live. Everyone seems to be unhappy, some of whom see new ways of being and living together. There seems to be a gap between what we ought to do and what we do that we barely understand as individuals or as a collective.
Changes needed to resolve tension in our cities will come when the conditions are right.
An essential practice: notice if it is time for change. If not, be patient. If yes, seek out the ways you can influence the conditions for change. My next posts will explore other critical practices that support our uneasy journey.
_____ _____ _____
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.
Is everyone unhappy with how we organize our cities? Citizens don’t like what city hall does. Developers and builders don’t like what city hall does. Civic advocacy groups don’t like what city hall does. I recently worked with a group of city employees who have been battered and bruised by colleagues in city hall, politicians, civil society, developers and builders, and citizens. City hall isn’t happy either; every effort they make doesn’t seem to be right and they can’t see a way through to get it right. They are miserable. Everyone sounds miserable.
I am hungry for something other than fighting city hall.
I am hungry for civic practices that allow us to see what is working, so we can have more of what works.
I am hungry for civic practices that allow us to see what does not working and grapple with solutions in ways that leave everyone’s dignity in tact.
I am hungry for civil society that serves cities.
I am hungry for civic managers that serve cities.
I am hungry for civic builders and developers that serve cities
I am hungry for citizens that serve cities.
_____ _____
This is my quest: to see what it takes for a city to serve everyone and everything in and around cities well.
_____ _____
All aspects of a city need to be healthy for the city to be healthy. We need to be healthy for our cities to be healthy. If our cities don’t serve us well, it is up to us to make it better. Each of us. While some of us have more influence over others to make cities that work for us, no one has enough influence to make what they want happen. Uncertainty is embedded in our cities. How we react to the uncertainty is key; we can fight or we can choose to figure out how to figure it out.
The route we choose creates the conditions for more of what we put our attention: we can have more fighting, or we can figure it out.
City hall isn’t healthy when they constantly hear what’s wrong. Developers and builders don’t build great cities when we don’t ask them to. Civil society doesn’t succeed in keeping us honest to our ideals when we are not open to hearing them. Citizens – at any scale – are not their best when defensively in trenches, sabotaging their best potential.
My fight is of a strange nature. I do not ‘fight’ in a physical way, of course, but also not in mental or emotional ways. I am a warrior of a different kind.
I create the conditions where the various perspectives of the city come out to play, integrating themselves, with give and take, for the purpose of creating a nourishing habitat for the beings that live in and around cities. This will evoke a different sort of warrior in our cities: one who has the calm poise needed to welcome the feedback our world is giving us, who listens to it, who takes wise action. Where cities become warriors for well-being themselves.
No matter how hard and smart we work, we can not shake the unknown. It is always with us. How we respond to the unknown, though, has an impact on how we show up in our communities. Ben Okri plays with the contrast of choices in our response: we can be calm or frantic:
Notice (y)our response to the unknownWe only know two kinds of responseTo the unknownAwe, or noise;Silence, or terror;Humility, or paralysis;Prayer, or panic;Stillness, or speech;Watchfulness, or myth-making;Seeing clearly, or inventing what we see;Standing, or felling;Reasoning, or falling apart;Courage, or cowardice.From Ben Okri’s “Mental Fight”
The choice to be calm or frantic resides within each of us individually. Our response affects others and at the same time it is always a choice that resides in me when folks are frantic around me. I always have a choice. Each of us always has a choice. And this choice quite dramatically affects how I show up in my life, my work and my community. I can cause a stir that distracts from what’s happening in the world, or I can cause calm that sees the stir for what it is: an opportunity, rather than a fight.
Noticing my, and our, response to the unknown is crucial for our uneasy journey as individuals, collectives, and as a species, in cities. When conscious of what is going on in our internal worlds, we are better able to serve ourselves, others and our cities well.
An essential practice: notice (y)our response to the unknown. My next posts will explore other critical practices that support our uneasy journey.
_____ _____ _____
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.
