Over the last few weeks I have been exploring the city’s 12 evolutionary intelligences as articulated by author Marilyn Hamilton (Integral City – click here for her web site, here for her book). This is the last of the 12 intelligences – evolving intelligence. (In my next post, I will recap the 12 and summarize them.)
Hamilton asks this essential question: How can we live in cities intelligently? To answer this question, I propose two more:
How do citizens create the city?
How do cities create citizens?
There is a back-and-forth relationship between these two elements. Cities and citizens co-evolve together. As one shifts and changes, so does the other. The whole city system and all the systems that make up the city are constantly adjusting, readjusting to the changing conditions surrounding them. Our physical environment is changing, our biology is changing, our psychology is changing, our culture is changing. Our very consciousness is changing. Citizens and cities are co-evolving.
Cities, as a are citizens, are not steady-state. Cities are forever responding to many changing conditions. Here is Hamilton’s logic about evolving intelligence for cities [1]:
Seeing the city as a whole system of whole systems reveals an emergent, evolving system.
Seeing systems reveals interconnections and non-linearity.
Non-linearity helps us live with, prepare for and anticipate the unexpected.
Having muscles for the unexpected creates resilience.
Resilience means greater adaptability.
Greater adaptability means greater survivability.
Greater survivability means more joy, expansion, creativity, potential.
The very relationship between our species and the habitat we build for ourselves serves our evolution. Understanding this is allows our intelligence to evolve. Understanding our relationship with our habitat – both given to us and created by us – allows us to thrive.
My next post will distill the 12 evolutionary intelligences into bite-size pieces.
In the second last of my series of posts on Marilyn Hamilton’s 12 evolutionary intelligences for cities, I explore living intelligence. For Hamilton, a city is considered alive because it is has the ability to:
survive
connect with its environment
replicate its capacities
This leads Hamilton to two critical questions:
How can we optimize the life of people in the city?
How can we optimize the life of the city in people?
The possible answers to these questions give us a sense of the kind of feedback we should be seeking as we navigate towards cities that serve us well (and citizenship that serves cities well). Drawing on evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris, Hamilton asks a series of questions that I reframe here as qualities for our cities that serve as likely ‘destinations’. We desire our cities to be able to:
Sustain healthy bio-physical, psychological, cultural and social life
Create and replenish the life conditions that support life
Know where and how to renew
Our ability – collectively and individually – to do the above is an indicator of health, illness or death. The cycle of life is alive in cities, just as it is in us.
I believe that cities are alive. Just as we can recognize in ourselves, they are “constantly learning to adapt and survive under all possible life conditions: stable, stormy/unsettled, turbulent, clear [1].” Cities battle to be healthy and thrive. Cities battle forces that work against them from time to time and when savvy will adjust to changing life conditions to survive and thrive. This is complex work for cities, as they are complex systems. Nothing linear is at work here. It is a web of meshes that is full of both hierarchies and self-organizing systems. Order and chaos.
My next post will explore the last of the 12 evolutionary intelligences – evolving intelligence. After that, I sense that I will need to reorganize these intelligences to present them in a simpler format. That will be my challenge for next week…
Over the course of several posts I have been exploring, one by one, the 12 evolutionary intelligences for cities proposed by Marilyn Hamilton. I have three left. Today’s post is about navigating intelligence: whole-system feedback processes.
As I have been exploring the qualities of cities and what drives their evolution, there is one very clear pattern: feedback. Feedback ensures that we are able to know and understand our world, and this is a very important factor when we consider that our world is always changing. It is crucial that we understand the changes that are taking place, understand the adjustments that are needed, make those adjustments and confirm if the adjustments have the desired effect. None of this is possible without feedback.
My view of how cities work (and evolve) looks like this:
Our work, our constant efforts to think, make and do new things, drives our economic life and is, in fact, the force that creates cities. This takes place in the context of our physical habitat. Cities start where they make sense, where there is water, shelter, food and a resource on which to build an economy. As the settlement grows, our work also becomes the physical making of the city. Our social habitat is the glue – it is where, and through which, feedback travels, telling us when times are changing and new methods of farming are needed, or that communication via computers is possible, etc.
Feedback loops are absolutely critical in the relationship between humans and our habitat. The quality of our habitat depends on it. The quality of our lives depends on it. Our ability to thrive depends on it.
We are moving into a new era where the possibilities of having the means to monitor how are cities are doing is totally possible. Cities I worked with several years ago slaved to have performance indicators to tell them how there were doing in relation to housing, water quality, education, etc. But it was hard to get that data and confirm that it was accurate and politically defensible. As data becomes more and more open, there will be more and more citizens and organizations examining the dynamics of their cities and pointing out what works and what does not. A new era of noticing city dynamics is soon upon us. A new era of feedback on how well our cities serve us is coming.
There is insight in data, and we now have an abundance of data and abundant access to data. The next question is what we hope to do with the data we have. What questions should we ask? What insight do we want and need? Where do we want to go with our cities (ie purpose)? What do we need more of to get there?
This whole business if feedback requires us to be prepared to ask questions and receive answers. And also prepared to respond as needed. It requires bravery and courage. It is a necessary skill to ensure that we are able to navigate our way to cities that serve citizens well. The hard part will be articulating the purpose of our cities – our destination – and what success looks like. Then we will be equipped to navigate our world and dynamically steer our cities into the future.
My next post will focus on living intelligence and the insight of life cycles in cities.
This image is from a 2010 article on 3D imagery showing the brain’s circuitry in the highest resolution yet (follow this link to Stanford Medicine’s YouTube video. Essentially they have taken 700 nanometer slices of a mouse’s cortex and mapped the connections. Even with the new imagery, the result is a level of complexity seen in the brain that is hard to comprehend. Our cities, as our creations, are as complex. There is much that we can’t see, and lots of what we can see is hard to comprehend.
Here’s what Stanford professor Stephen Smith has to say about this, according to writer Rebecca Boyle:
“A human cerebral cortex holds about 125 trillion synapses, which are connections among neurons, packed into an ultra-thin layer of tissue. That’s equivalent to the number of stars in 1,500 Milky Way galaxies…These electrical interfaces are found throughout the brain, control our thinking, feeling and movement.
“The sheer number of synapses makes it nearly impossible to see them – even the best traditional-light microscopes cannot resolve them all… A single neuron might have tens of thousands of synaptic contacts with other neurons.”
When I look at cities, I have the same imagery in mind. Just on a different scale. These images of brains bring to mind images of cities. Here is a photo of cities in China, taken from the International Space Station in December 2010 (Photo Credit: NASA):
Photo Credit: NASA
Whether looking at our brains inside us, or the cities we build outside of us, it is clear that despite the fact that there is no one element or person that is in charge, clear patterns emerge. All of our brains are so alike that we recognize ourselves as a singe species. Our cities also take remarkably similar shapes independently. The pattern that emerges from both of these environments is that chaos and order exist simultaneously.
Meshworking is the ability to hold both hierarchies of order and self-organizing systems. Marilyn Hamilton began using this term to describe the work that she does in cities. Typically a term used in brain science, she applied it to cities, where she noticed that “the city integrates enabling hierarchies and self-organizing webs of relationships by aligning different capacities, functions and locations so they can be of service to a purpose and each other [1].”
The city, just like a brain, needs hierarchy and order to build itself. The order is scaffolding. Once the scaffolding is in place, the city self-organizes itself in numerous, infinite ways by making connections. It is an amazing combination: the ability to forever reinvent as well as the ability to sort and choose [2].
The value of meshworking – the ability to make catalytic connections – in cities is that it enables whole system thinking. This is work that naturally takes place in our cities and it is a work that we can choose to enhance to nourish our cities’ emergence into what they next need to be for us. It requires establishing new order when old hierarchies are in need of recalibration. It requires establishing new connections at every turn to nurture our self-organizing. All of this is about our collective learning together to create habitats that meet our needs.
Cities are full of hierarchies and self-organizing systems. The challenge in our work is to find the balance, each and every moment, that meets our life conditions. Always at the appropriate scale.
There is so much more to say about meshworking. You may be interested in Hamilton’s work: click here for her web site, here for her book. As I conclude this post, I realize that yesterday’s post about inquiry intelligence, and this post about meshworking intelligence, are two types of evolutionary intelligence that nourish the city that is wanting to come into being.
We are in a new era of communication (think social media, internet etc) that is building whole new ways and kinds of connections between cities. This is certainly a new form of scaffolding (order) we are building for ourselves in our cities. It is also creating the conditions for new ways for citizens to self-organize. A new city is emerging. I wonder what it is.
Tomorrow’s post will explore another evolutionary intelligence for cities: navigating intelligence.
This post is about inquiry intelligence – our capacity to release potential – one of 12 evolutionary intelligences identified by Marilyn Hamilton in her Integral City work (click here for her web site, here for her book). Her work is based on the premise that cities are intelligent human systems. I share that belief and her quest to unlock the potential of cities.
The essence of inquiry intelligence lays in appreciative inquiry, a practice of exploring that integrates many perspectives. It is a practice that looks for surprise. In cities it is a practice that notices what works in our cities, the things of which we would like more. Our potential lies in what is working and the new paths that will emerge.
We get more of what we put our attention to, so stopping to notice what we appreciate in our cities is a good practice. It serves two purposes – we recognize what works and we recognize what we want more of.
Inquiry intelligence takes this wisdom and looks at it with curiosity. When I began the Nest City posts I explored the nature of work, and how we regularly look for new ways of thinking, making and doing new things. This is inquiry intelligence at work.
Marilyn Hamilton flags how questions play a key role in unlocking the potential of cities. Particularly questions that are appreciative in nature. Asking a question such as, ‘What are the strengths of your city?’ will reveal what Hamilton calls the ‘cadence’ of the city, when we are able to see the variety of values evident in how we see and experience the city.
To see our potential, let alone achieve it, we need to create the conditions that allow us to see what works and what we want more of, and to inquire about what our cities naturally need next.
The power of inquiry is simply in asking and exploring questions, endlessly. It is a key intelligence that brought our cities to where they are today because it is a learning intelligence. It allows us to know and understand things differently. Inquiry nourishes our selves and our cities.
Tomorrow’s post will explore meshing intelligence, our capacity to hold both order and creativity simultaneously.
Marilyn Hamilton [1] frames these intelligences explicitly as the four integral voices of the city, each of which contributes to the ‘discourse’ of the city: citizens, civic managers, civic developers and civil society.
The voices of citizens express the center of gravity of the city’s values. In democratic countries, citizens have the power to elect and criticize the other voices in the city. They have power as intentional consumers. They express the power of engagement and intention. They are the voice of the city spirit.
The voices of city managers are the voice of city expertise; they are the guides that oversee the needs of the city. They are the people who work at city hall, school boards, health institutions on our behalf. They are the voice of the city brain.
The voices of civil society are the cultural voice of the city. These are the social organizations and non-government organizations that attend to the social needs of the city. They are the voices of the city’s heart.
The voices of city developers are traditionally the people who ‘conceive of, invest in and build the infrastructure of the city’. These voices focus on the future – the vision and promise of the city.
Hamilton sums up these voices this way: “While the voice of the citizens and city managers are usually preoccupied with the affairs of the present and the voices of civil society value things of the past, the voices of city developers speak in the future tense.”
The co-mingling of these voices are the dance of the city, and the tension in the city too. This tension is a critical dynamic in the evolution of cities and our relationship with them, in our multiple roles as citizens, civic managers, civic developers and civil society.
My next post will continue to explore evolutionary intelligence – and the power of inquiry to reach our evolutionary potential.
The culture of the city represents the lived values of its citizens. It is the perpetual barometer of ‘what’s important around here.’ [1]
I began this series of posts on evolutionary intelligences with integral intelligence (part 1 and part 2). In these two parts, four maps were shared that help us see our cities as wholes. One of those maps was the integral map with four quadrants (see part 2). Marilyn Hamilton imagines the four quadrants as four intelligences for an Integral City (her book, her website).
This is the last of four posts that look at four of the evolutionary intelligences for the city from the vantage point of each of the four quadrants. The last post, building intelligence, explored the lower right quadrant – building intelligence. Today, we look at the lower left and our capacity to feed the spirit of the city and each other in cities.
The culture of cities is about relationships – and the relationship of cultures. For Hamilton, “The relationships of the city’s cultures can be heard and felt [2].” They are ‘tangible’ on the collective level the same way our emotions within ourselves as individuals are tangible. They are real and alive. The strength of this intelligence from the lower left quadrant is dependent upon the quality of relationships among our cultures. In fact, as Hamilton puts it, relationships may the be prime currency of the Integral City, a city that integrates the range of evolutionary intelligences.
Hamilton highlights three kinds of relationships[3]:
Simple transactional relationships, where an exchange is made, but neither part to the relationship are changed.
Transformative relationships, where the exchange causes one or both parties to recognizably change form.
Transmutational relationships, the parties are fundamentally recombined into something completely new. A new pattern emerges.
New patterns are critical to evolutionary intelligence, for it is the emergence of new patterns that signal our evolution, our response to changing life conditions. The three relationships above are simple, complicated and complex. The complex relationships are the ones that lead to new patterns.
Recall Spiral Dynamics, one of the four integral maps to see whole systems of a city (click here for a primer on evolutionary expansion and here for a recap of the integral maps). Our movement up the Spiral is a result of new patterns, new ways of being in relationship with our surroundings. Our relationship with our surroundings – at the scale of the individual and collective – is at the heart of our drive to survive. At every turn we see new things that need to be done and we seek to improve them. At every turn our context changes and we seek to improve it. And as we grow our values shift and adjust in response.
At the heart of this intelligence is our need to thrive with each other. We are in cities to create the conditions to thrive. We choose cities to create the conditions to thrive. Our relationships are getting more and more complex and we continue to evolve. We have no idea where we will go exactly, but we are going on. We will continue to thrive.
My next post will offer a recap of the four integral city voices: citizens, city managers, city developers/builders, and civil society.
I began this series of posts on evolutionary intelligences with integral intelligence (part 1 and part 2). In these two parts, four maps were shared that help us see our cities as wholes. One of those maps was the integral map with four quadrants (see part 2). Marilyn Hamilton imagines the four quadrants as four intelligences for an Integral City (her book, her website).
This is the third of four posts that look at four of the evolutionary intelligences for the city from the vantage point of each of the four quadrants. The last post, embodying intelligence in action, explored the upper right quadrant – outer intelligence. Today, we look at the lower right and our capacity to create structures that meet our needs in cities. In particular, this intelligence is about building structures that flex and flex and flow in response to our changing needs.
The city is a built environment. It is built by us for us. It is built to serve our needs, whether we do this consciously or not.
When I first started the Nest City Blog back on May 1, I traced the migration of humans from a small settlement in Africa to the expanse of our planet. As we migrated, we physically built everything from makeshift shelters and eventually cities. We also built social structures to organize ourselves to meet our needs. As we build cities, we build physical artifacts and social systems.
The relationship between physical and social structures is critical. As Hamilton puts it: “… the alignment of infrastructure and human organizational structure optimizes intelligence [1].”
Building intelligence is part of the story of the evolution of St. John’s, Newfoundland that I relayed in my posts entitled Is the uplanned city unplanned? Part 1, part 2,part 3,part 4). In these posts I write about how as the purpose of a settlement evolves, the structures (physical or social) evolve alongside (see part 3). These structures will respond to the life conditions of the time – and our value systems as they are evolving. This is the essential relationship between us and our habitat, and one of the results is our building intelligence. (For more on evolving value systems, please visit A primer on the emerging spiral.”
So our structures reveal our values.
Edmonton’s City Market Downtown is vital to the exchange of goods in the city, particularly between the city and its region:
This reliable, sturdy building houses accountants in Toronto:
The Art Gallery of Ontario exhibits creativity and entrepreneurship:
The physical shape we give our cities reflects our values, as do our social structure choices. This is how our building intelligence of the lower right quadrant materializes in cities; “Structures become a visible history of human intentions, choices and relationships [2].”
What we build (physically and socially) always adjusts over time in response to our needs. Our ability to do this rests not alone in the building intelligence of the lower right quadrant. It has everything to do with our ability to adjust our intentions (upper left) and our actions and choices (upper right) that result in what we build (lower right). The integration of these integral city perspectives is what creates the conditions for cities and citizens to thrive – particularly when this intelligence can flex and flow with the changing conditions.
My next post will highlight the lower left quadrant – story intelligence – and how we culturally feed each other in our cities.
I began this series of posts on evolutionary intelligences with integral intelligence (part 1 and part 2). In these two parts, four maps were shared that help us see our cities as wholes. One of those maps was the integral map with four quadrants (see part 2). Marilyn Hamilton imagines the four quadrants as four intelligences for an Integral City (her book, her website).
This is the second of four posts that look at four of the evolutionary intelligences for the city from the vantage point of each of the four quadrants. The last post, conscious capacity, explored the upper left quadrant – inner intelligence. Today, we look at the upper right and our capacity to turn our intention into right action – outer intelligence.
If inner intelligence is about seeing the collective intention, or purpose, of a city. Outer intelligence, in the upper right quadrant, is about embodying that intention. It is about making the intention come to life; making it happen. As intention changes over time, outer intelligence is about changing our behaviours to align with changes in a city’s purpose as we evolve.
In yesterday’s blog, Hamilton briefly describes the role of demographics in outer intelligence. Just as a human body acts and behaves, so too does the city system. Just as the human body has networks of feedback systems, so too does the city. Understanding the characteristics of individuals and groups in the city will help us make decisions about how to ensure, as a collective, we are providing for our biophysical needs (air, water, food, clothing and shelter) and beyond.
Transport, telecom networks and social media spawn new data
Urbanites consume less and produce more
Cities foster the exchange of ideas
A new science of the city is emerging – like physics or biology
One day city hall may be packed with screens like a Formula 1 pit
We are just beginning to learn about how the deluge of data will change how we see our cities – and how we manage them. In what ways can we use data to see if our actions are aligned with our intentions as we choose, increasingly, to live in cities together?
Drawing on the four quadrants, I can see that the city managers (upper right) can use this emerging deluge of data to track our collective actions. I can imagine city builders using it as they decide what to build. I can imagine civil society (lower left) contributing its understanding into the mix. I can imagine citizens (upper left) reflecting on data to ascertain if our intentions are appropriate and adjusting as necessary.
The feedback loops that allow the city to sense itself play a significant role in city life. Right now, with the development of new data sets and the practice of analytics, we are just scratching the surface of a whole new way to see how the city system acts and behaves. The city is actively evolving with us right now, creating the conditions for us to evolve and thrive.
My next post will explore the lower right quadrant – building intelligence – and the structures that allow us to flex and flow in our cities.
I began this series of posts on evolutionary intelligences with integral intelligence (part 1 and part 2). In these two parts, four maps were shared that help us see our cities as wholes. One of those maps was the integral map, shown like this (illustrated by Brandy Agerbeck):
This, and the next three posts, will each focus on one of these quadrants, as applied to the city. Author Marilyn Hamilton calls this Integral City (her book, her website). For our purposes, imagine the four quadrants like this:
Four of the evolutionary intelligences identified by Hamilton are from the vantage point of each of the four quadrants. Today, we look at the upper left – inner intelligence.
As we explored emerging intelligence, I made the case that the city is alive. Alive also means consciousness, a key aspect to Hamilton’s inner intelligence. When exploring emerging intelligence, I also introduced the notion of the city as a whole system made up of smaller whole systems, such as individuals, families, neighbourhoods, organizations, etc. Each of these whole systems are holons, each with a conscious intention. From the vantage point on inner intelligence, Hamilton states that “individual citizen attention and citizen intention lie at the heart of the intelligent city and at the center of the city’s capacity to sustain itself [1].”
It is from our inner intelligence, that together, as a social holon, citizens of a city discern purpose. Again, Hamilton: “For a city to function optimally, its citizens need to practise, manage and lead from a sense of purpose in their collective lives. Such an awareness could coalesce the intention of all learning systems with the relevant application of resources in the city [2].”
As we choose to live collectively in the city, we do so with purpose – to create the conditions for us to thrive. And the very purpose we see for our cities evolves along with us. It emerges. Remember the purposes of the city of St. John’s, Newfoundland, and how we conceive the purpose for the city is in relation to our life conditions. We evolve and what we need from our cities also evolves.
City Purposes
What we need form our cities comes from the inner intelligence of our individual intentions. In the holon of the city, this is the intelligence of collective citizenship. This collective sense of purpose of the city is actually a big mess. “A citizen in any given city will hold a spectrum of values to which she pays attention and for which she will form intentions and purposes [3].” Compound this with all the citizens of a city and the values and intentions and purposes end up being potentially quite diffused. Yet, as Hamilton points out, when enough people share their dreams the cities vision, or mission, or purpose can emerge. It emerges from the inner intelligence of citizenship.
Our inner intelligence is growing. Our conscious capacity is growing. As we grow and evolve with our cities we learn new capacities at every turn. We are learning to grow our capacities to be conscious of our habitat and respond appropriately. Our inner intelligence is growing so we can be the citizens our cities need.
My next post will explore outer intelligence, the upper right quadrant, and our capacity to ’embody right action.’
