Social habitat key to journey

 

I started this chapter with a reminder that cities are meant to feel uneasy.  And living in cities, and the process of creating and recreating them, is a journey in two senses: as we travel along in our evolution and as an act of learning.

The learning that takes place in our cities is a result of our drive to endlessly think, make and do new things to improve the quality of our lives.  The work we do creates our cities.  But getting improvement means we need to scratch the itch, for the itch is what tells us that there is something to improve.  It bothers us, compelling us to do something about it.

We are itching for improvement.  At any scale (self, family, neighbourhood, organization, city, region, nation, planet), we experience akrasia, the gulf between what we know we ought to do and what we actually do.  This tension serves as the evolutionary driver of cities and our own development.

Our response to our habitat (our surroundings) is what drives the creation of new work, and the development of new work is a survival skill.  But this only takes place if and when we are receptive to receiving feedback from our surroundings. Our ability to seek feedback and receive it is a survival skill – at any scale.  This practice is critical for our cities, for they are habitats we create for express purpose of improving life.  We shape our cities and they, in turn, shape us.

Our ability to evolve our cities is a survival skill.  Understanding that our cities, and all their inhabitants, are on a journey together is crucial.  We do not know exactly where we are going and we never will.  What we do know is that we are going on this trip together.  Ensuring a healthy connection between our work and our habitat is crucial, and this connection is dependent upon the social habitat we create for ourselves, for it is our social habitat that invites and allows feedback to flow.  If our social habitat is not well, our actions are ill-informed and possibly harmful.  If healthy, we are wise.  For our cities to be well, we need to create a social habitat where feedback flows.

It is time to embark explicitly on a journey together where we create a social habitat that brings the best out of us, that support each of us, and the collective, in the discomfort we find when we start to scratch the things that itch.  We need to organize ourselves to physically build cities that work for us, AND we need to organize ourselves to support each other in the uneasiness of city building.

This is tough work, and critical work.  And it will never end because we are forever recreating our world in city, creating new life conditions to which we adapt, creating new life conditions to which we adapt, creating new life conditions to which we adapt etc.

Tomorrow, on Wednesday October 24, 2012, I am spending the day with 18ish to 30ish year-olds in Edmonton to declare the impossibly awesome neighbourhood possible.  For this event, I am working with The Natural Step Canada to create a social habitat in which dreams come true.  I’ll let you know how it goes.  

 

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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.

Itchy patterns

 

My whole being knows when something is wrong.  Sometimes I know exactly what it is, and other times I can’t quite put my finger on it.  I can be conscious or unconscious of what is bothering me.  And the more I get to know myself, I see that I have a choice to make about whether I notice if something is bothering me.

Our work for improvement, at the scale of self, city or planet, requires an awareness first of what bothers me/us.  We need to notice the itch before we’ll scratch it with the express purpose of thinking, making and doing new things.

Many posts ago I described the work of Don Beck and Christopher Cowan on Spiral Dynamics (here’s a link to my first post on their work, evolving value systems).  Here’s a simple pattern they offer about phases of change and how the itch feels (see pages 85-92 of their book).

Beck and Cowan highlight five phases of change, each easily recognizable moments in life.   At Alpha (top left of illustration), everything feels good and comfortable. At Beta, we begin to sense that something is wrong.  At Gamma, we know something is wrong and feel quite confused about what to do and could be very angry.  Through all the discomfort of Gamma, we can emerge at Delta with a new sense of direction and enthusiasm that can lead to New Alpha – a new sense of stability.

The amount of time we spend in each of these phases of change varies – a moment or decades.  As things change around us, we may remain at Alpha, not yet noticing the uneasiness of Beta.  If open to learning, when we find unsettling conditions at Beta and Gamma, we will find ways to understand the discomfort and know it precisely.  If really angry and confused, we could be at Gamma for a long time.  If not well equipped to see how to formulate plans and implement New Alpha, we could be at Delta for a great length of time, or even revert back to Gamma.

Here’s the clincher – if we welcome and seek deeper knowing, we invite uneasiness.  As we look for new ways to think, make and do things – the which is the source of the city impulse articulated in Chapter 1 – we aim to improve our lives, and by doing so we are creating new life conditions to which we will again have to adapt. Time, immediately or longer term, will reveal new uneasiness with those life conditions for nothing is as simple as making everyone happy all the time forever.

This means that as we work to organize ourselves, in cities or anywhere, we must develop practices to recognize when we are feeling uneasy at Beta and practices to figure out what is making us uneasy.  We need to develop practices that will help us through Gamma.  We must develop practices that allow the Delta prototypes to thrive on their way to New Alpha.  Behind the scenes here, there are a series of other questions around the practices that we each need, individually, for self.  And how we practice as groups, communities, neighbourhoods, organizations, cities and for the human species.

We are on a learning journey together as we think, make and do new things to improve our quality of life.

I will explore practices that support our learning journey specifically in Part 3 of Nest City.  My next post will connect our learning journey with Chapter 1 – The City Impulse.

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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.

 

A hole in the roof

My home, my nest, is getting an overhaul.  And it has a hole in its roof.  The truth is, we put the hole in on purpose, which is a little counter intuitive.  But we have our reasons.

Our home is a post-war building with very little insulation, and little or no ventilation, so we are installing a new roof on top of the old roof to improve the building’s ability to keep itself and it’s occupants warm and dry.

We decided not to simply replace the shingles, for that only solves a portion of the building’s challenges.  We have chosen to improve how the whole roof system works for the building.  We decided not to build a whole new nest; we are making an investment in this one.  She has lots to give us yet if we look after her.

So the whole in the roof…

There is a part of us that would love to make massive changes to the building.  We realize that the space gained with an addition will not be needed in less than a decade (kids are 12 and 14).  We also don’t have the strength to organize ourselves for a big reno.  We also don’t wish to put our money in a big reno.  But that doesn’t mean that we don’t want to treat ourselves.  We chose a skylight to light up the stairwell and serve as a solar chimney on hot days.  So our contractor cut a hole in the roof.

As we stood in the stairwell today, the kids and I looked through the roof out, over the neighbourhood, right through the fresh air.  In the evening it is covered with a tarp, but as we move up and down the stairs we can hear the hum of the city.  When it rained last night, it sounded like we were sleeping in our tent.

As I was falling asleep last night listening to the rain I realized that roof has an important job.  For our species, we need to have somewhere warm and dry, our shelter, to survive.  The very roof we choose to build on our shelters reflects our life conditions.  Our home was built in a time when energy  to heat homes was abundant and cheap.  Energy is more scarce and more expensive and we are compelled to improve our building.  Our context changes and we eventually change too, and our structures, our physical habitats, with us.

It took a hole in the roof for me to realize that the new roof is really about, at a family scale, fixing our nest, our family habitat.  We are doing what we need to do to make sure the building functions well.  We are also moving beyond pure function and sorting out as a family how we can ‘dress up’ the building so it conveys our style, our identity.

We have a chance to put our mark on our nest.  As we come and go from our nest, we come and go from a place we have created for ourselves.  A home can pull on the heart strings and we are choosing colours and materials that pull on our heart strings.  We are also adding to the neighbourhood’s identity of itself. Collectively with our neighbours, we make our streets and neighbourhood.  Everyone’s choices accumulate to a feeling about our place and our collective identity.

When we chose to put in a skylight, it felt gratuitous.  But I am glad we put the hole in the roof.

Every time I travel the stairs I will be able to see the neighbourhood, the treetops and the stars from a new vantage point.

 

The city as antagonist

In our city life, is the city the antagonist or citizens?

It’s hard to say.  Consider this passage from Lynn Coady’s The Antagonist (p. 234-5):

I am starting to view my past in a different way these days.  Strange to say under the circumstances, but I think now that I used to see my past as a book – a story with a beginning, middle, and end, all of which I knew by heart, and therefore had no reason to even crack the spine.  But now I am starting to see it as something more like a frontier – a landscape I have spent my life cultivating, fortifying against the random elements.  But the landscape is alive, is what I am realizing – is a thing unto itself – and if you’re brave enough to ever leave your house you start to see this.  In fact, the landscape consists of multiple things, multiple wills that shift and change and occasionally assert themselves in force. None of this, you eventually understand, belongs to you – not a rock or flower a broken branch – no matter how you work it, no matter how much scrub you clear.  The ground could decide to open up above your head.
 
The world is independent.  It moves, and moves on, with or without you.
 
Everything, that is, except that which you make die.  What you’ve killed is yours, forever – a trophy picked off from the landscape and hung up on your wall.
 
So you can greet one another each day.
 

The city, and city life, could be viewed as a story with a beginning, middle and an end.  It could be a story with all three of these elements know (or thought to be known) or it could be a story that has started and we just don’t know the end yet.  Just as the protagonist in The Antagonist, though, I too am starting to see city life as a frontier.  City life both cultivates random elements and fortifies against random elements.  City life is alive.

City live generates new conditions and problems to which we have to adjust.  It causes us random elements.  As the generation of new habitat causes us to adjust and innovate, this is the very skill we need to fortify against random elements.  And as we do this work, endlessly because the story doesn’t have an ending that we can grasp, if there is one.

Just as the protagonist above, our city life consists of multiple things, multiple lives, multiple forces that ‘shift and change and occasionally assert themselves in force.’  As much as the city belongs to us and is created by us, it is not created by me.  No matter how hard I work as an individual, ‘no matter how much scrub [i] clear,’ I do not have control over it.  We create it and we can shape it.  It may or may not work for me.  Whether I am alive or dead, the city will move on with or without me.

What is clear to me, is that while I am in relationship with my city (from within or from afar), I do have control over what I keep from having a full life in cities. While this may appear to be a negative thing, it is crucial. I can choose, with every interaction I have with others, to allow the full potential for cities and citizens to emerge.  I can help my city and citizens be fully alive, if they so choose.

Each of us have this decision –  make things die or create the conditions for things to thrive.

When the city challenges us, it feels like the antagonist.  This a crucial role, creating the challenges and tensions we need to grow.  When we choose to make things die, we are the antagonist, for we keep citizens and the city from reaching their full potential.

I recognize that I can be the kind of antagonist that provides constructive tension.  (Citizens create the very conditions that we have to respond to as a city!)  I also recognize that I can be a destructive antagonist.  When destructive, I aim to be conscious and see the trophy’s on my wall.  I aim to see them and get to know them so that I may learn to serve myself, my fellow citizens and my city well.

I embrace the city and its challenges as a constructive antagonist in my (our) life (lives).  The city creates the life conditions we and I need to grow and evolve.  City life puts us on the frontier.

 

 

 
 

Concluding city patterns

 

In these Nest City posts, I have looked at cities in three ways so far: our impulse to build and gather in cities, our impulse to organize our cities and last, our impulse to thrive as a species.  In exploring each of these three impulses, patterns about our cities are revealed that are crucial to understanding how to organize our cities our cities to serve their citizens well – and how to be citizens to serve cities well.

Chapter 1 – The City Impulse

Building cities as our habitat naturally occurs for us.  We work at this every day – psychologically, physically, socially and culturally.  Our work, whether paid or unpaid, is always in response to our habitat.  We work constantly to think, make and do new things, which changes our habitat and our responses to habitat.  And so on, endlessly.

Our relationship with our habitat – cities – feeds the evolution of our cities and our habitat.  Given this relationship, it is time to build the nest we need.

 

Chapter 2 – The Planning Impulse

The overriding purpose of a city is to integrate the needs of its people with its context, to create a habitat in which citizens will survive and thrive.  The purpose of planning is to support a city’s efforts to notice, adjust and organize to ensure the city is able to integrate the needs of its citizens with its context.

The city is a dance of voices and values and  the act of linear planning is simply a level of organizing that responds to a particular set of life conditions.  There is a time and place for linear planning, and life conditions are now emerging allowing us to recalibrate the practice of planning that holds a destination in mind while allowing for learning and adjustment along the way.  We are learning to live into a reality in which we recognize that we do not know exactly where we will end up.

 

Chapter 3 – The Thriving Impulse

Our cities are built by us and for us.  We do this to ensure that we survive, yet as we saw in Chapter One, we have a drive to constantly think, make and do new things in our work.  The result is our drive to thrive.  This drive results in cities.  And cities compel us to think, make and do more new things.  This is the essence of our evolutionary relationship with cities: an infinity loop.

Spiral Dynamics describes this pattern well: we grow and develop – evolve – in response to our life conditions.  12 intelligences also serve the evolutionary character of cities and our relationship with cities.  While they each offer much to understanding cities, they can be summarized in as evolutionary intelligence one useful sentence:

Seeing the whole city as alive, evolving wholes that need nourishment allows us to navigate toward cities that serve citizens well, and citizens that serve cities well.  
 

On to Part 2 – Organizing for Emergence

Part 2 of Nest City will focus on four things: destination, journey, emergence and the sweet spot at the intersection.  This is the dynamic of how we can set ourselves up to organize ourselves and our habitats well.

 

My next post will lay out the plot for Part 2 – Organizing for Emergence.  

 

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If you are interested in learning more about evolutionary intelligences relating to cities, you will be interested in the Integral City eLaboratory – Co-Creating the Future of the Human Hive.

 

Our impulse to thrive in cities

I am at the end of Chapter 3 – The Thriving Impulse.  Beginning with my June 13, 2012 post, Pause for evolutionary understanding, I asked this question: where do we need to put our attention to ride out our evolutionary burst successfully?

To begin, I explored some theoretical frameworks to shed some light on our evolutionary relationship with cities.  I looked first at Spiral Dynamics with a primer,  the principles that frame the Spiral and the conditions that guide evolutionary expansion.   We grow and develop – evolve – in response to our life conditions.  We evolve with our habitat in all aspects of our lives.  We have within us an evolutionary impulse to thrive.

From this point, I choose to explore Dr. Marilyn Hamilton’s 12 evolutionary intelligences one at a time.  As I concluded this process, I realized that I can summarize these 12 evolutionary intelligences in one sentence:

Seeing the whole city as alive, evolving wholes that need nourishment allows us to navigate toward cities that serve citizens well, and citizens that serve cities well.  

We see the whole city with integral maps, such as the nesting holarchy of city systems and Spiral Dynamics integralthe four quadrants and scalar, fractal relationships.  The four integral quadrants of the city allow us to see the city’s inner intelligence (our conscious capacity and psychological well-being), outer intelligence (embodying right action and biological well-being), building intelligence (creating structures that flex and flow, and our social well-being) and cultural intelligence (feeding each other and cultural well-being).

Thinking of cities as alive draws on our ecosphere intelligence and our living intelligence.  Seeing cities as evolving wholes draws on our emerging intelligence and our evolving intelligence.  And just like any living entity, cities need nourishment.  Cities and citizens thrive with inquiry intelligence and meshworking intelligence.

Our navigating intelligence allows us to declare a destination and notice if we are on track.  Ultimately, I believe we are aiming for cities that serve citizens well – and citizens that serve cities well.

This work is about thriving.  This is work that never ends.

 

This post wraps up Chapter 3 – The Thriving Impulse AND it also wraps up the first Part of Nest City.  Part One – City Patterns has looked at three impulses in the human species: the city impulse, the planning impulse and the thriving impulse. My next post will recap the patterns in our relationship with cities before switching gears and tackling how we can organize ourselves, and our nest cities, for emergence.

 

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If you are interested in learning more about evolutionary intelligences relating to cities, you will be interested in the Integral City eLaboratory – Co-Creating the Future of the Human Hive.

 

Evolutionary intelligence in a sentence

 

Over the last several weeks I have been exploring Marilyn Hamilton’s 12 evolutionary intelligences for the city.  They cover a great deal of territory and are so interconnected.  I often find it difficult to grasp and discern the 12 intelligences and I am hungry for a simpler way to ‘hold’ them.  12 are too many for my being to juggle.

At this juncture, I distill all 12 evolutionary intelligences for cities into the following sentence:

Seeing the whole city as alive, evolving wholes that need nourishment allows us to navigate toward cities that serve citizens well, and citizens that serve cities well.  

Let me unpack this sentence and reach back into each of the 12 evolutionary intelligences explored over the last few weeks to see how they fit, how they add up to this sentence.

Seeing the whole city

Seeing the whole city means using ‘maps’ to look at the city as a whole.  Integral intelligence means looking at the city with integral maps. Four of these maps are explored in earlier posts.  Here they are, with links to a description of them:  the nesting holarchy of city systems and Spiral Dynamics integralthe four quadrants and scalar, fractal relationships.

Seeing the whole city also means seeing the four integral quadrants of the city:

as alive,

Cities grow out of our evolving interaction with our habitat.  Our ecosphere intelligence allows us to be in relationship with our habitat and adjust and grow with it as life conditions change.  When we engage our living intelligence, we see that the city is alive because its survives, it connects with its environment and it regenerates.  If it doesn’t do this, it does not survive or thrive, but dies.

evolving wholes

Our emerging intelligence allows us to city the aliveness of the city and its complexity.  The city is made up of many other whole, identifiable systems: citizens, families, organizations, neighbourhoods, etc.  The city survives just as these systems survive, has a relationship with its environment as these systems do, and regenerates as these systems do.  The relationship between the city system and its systems are always in relationship with each other, which creates the conditions for our evolving intelligence.  The back-and-forth between cities and citizens, for example, fuels the development of all wholes.

that need nourishment

Cities and citizens alike need to be nourished to thrive.  Inquiry intelligence allows us to unlock the potential of cities by simply noticing and appreciating what works in cities and working to get more of it.  Inquiry also gives us the opportunity to imagine what we need that is well beyond “fixing”.  A “fix” keeps us where we are, but curiosity about what naturally needs to come next, and the inquiry into that, is hugely nourishing.  Asking and exploring questions endlessly nourishes our cities.

Then connections we make in cities, and the quality and quantity of those connections, also nourish the city.  This is meshing intelligence, our capacity to make catalytic connections within and between whole systems.  These relationships are self-organizing and hierarchical at the same time.  The health of both nourish the city.

allows us to navigate toward

Our navigating intelligence allows us to inhabit two behaviours – aiming for a destination and the activity of discerning if on course to that destination.  This intelligence is all about feedback loops, and the creation of feedback loops that allow us to see whether our actions are helping or harming our journey to where we wish to go.  This intelligence is increasingly asking us to know where we wish to go and what “getting there” would look like.

cities that serve citizens well, and citizens that serve cities well.

In a very general way, this phrase is what we are aiming for.  It is a superordinate goal.  As all of the intelligences weave together, and as we spend time contemplating what a city that serves its citizens well looks and feels like, or how citizens that serve the city well would show up, we will begin to identify what this relationship is really about.  Ultimately, this relationship is emerging and it will continue to emerge as the relationship between citizens and cities shifts and adjusts over time.

A parting thought for today

As we organize ourselves in cities, it is clear that how we “plan” is no longer a simple linear activity.  It is one way to organize ourselves, but it does not encompass the complexity of the ways we organize ourselves.  My writing to come will focus on this simple model to live the intelligences and make the relationship between citizens and cities more whole:

Organizing our cities requires a clear sense of destination to which we navigate.  We are on a journey to make our way to this destination, yet the truth is we do not know what the destination really is.  It is both clear where we are going and unclear.  We have a sense of direction, yet we recognize that where we will end up has yet to emerge.  Our destination, our journey and the emergent quality of our travels are all because of the 12 evolutionary intelligences, and supported by them.   It’s a big trip we are on.

 My next post will explore the practices and protocols that allow evolutionary intelligence – and our cities – to thrive.  In the meantime, here is a quick and tidy set of links to the 12 evolutionary intelligences:

    1. Ecosphere intelligence – locating places
    2. Emerging intelligence – seeing wholeness
    3. Integral intelligence part 1 and part 2 – charting patterns
    4. Living intelligence – living and dying
    5. Inner intelligence – conscious capacity
    6. Outer intelligence – embodying right action
    7. Building intelligence – creating structures that flex and flow
    8. Story intelligence – culture of feeding each other
    9. Inquiry intelligence – releasing potential
    10. Meshing intelligence – enabling order and creativity
    11. Navigating intelligence – directional dashboards
    12. Evolving intelligences – imagining the future

 

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If you are interested in learning more about evolutionary intelligences relating to cities, you will be interested in the Integral City eLaboratory – Co-Creating the Future of the Human Hive.

Evolving intelligence

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 sitehere 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:

  1. How do citizens create the city?
  2. 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]:
  1. Seeing the city as a whole system of whole systems reveals an emergent, evolving system.
  2. Seeing systems reveals interconnections and non-linearity.
  3. Non-linearity helps us live with, prepare for and anticipate the unexpected.
  4. Having muscles for the unexpected creates resilience.
  5. Resilience means greater adaptability.
  6. Greater adaptability means greater survivability.
  7. 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.

 

 

 

 

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[1] Marilyn Hamilton, Integral City, p. 261

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If you are interested in learning more about evolutionary intelligences relating to cities, you will be interested in the Integral City eLaboratory – Co-Creating the Future of the Human Hive.

Navigating for settlement habitat

Figure 1 - The Skyline Trail (Photo Credit - B. Sanders)

I just got back to civilization yesterday afternoon after spending four days in the backcountry hiking Skyline Trail near Jasper, Canada.  We hiked 46 km in varied mountain terrain – up an old fire road, around mountains, over mountains, through mountain passes, down into valleys, through alpine meadows and a 4.5 km stretch simply along the skyline with a 360 degree view of of the Canadian Rockies.

I was far removed from the city, yet one simple, familiar premise about cities kept popping up in my mind as we hiked: humans settle where the habitat is suitable.

The hikers:  We were two families of four.  Eight of us ranging from grade 4 to early forties.  We chose to take three or four days for the hike.  Many hikers take two or three days; we met a running group who were doing the trail in one day.  We gave ourselves the option to spend an extra night and have a fourth day in case we needed (which is what we did).

Our navigation aids:  We travelled without GPS.  We knew the trail would be obvious.  We also knew there would be people on the trail with information on the trail ahead of us.  We had good topographical maps so we could monitor landmarks and determine our general position.

Our challenge:  We did not know exactly where the camps were located.  None of the maps we could find showed precisely where the ‘settlements’ were.  We knew how far to hike to get to each campsite, but we had no way to measure specifically how far we had hiked and how far we had to go.  On relatively flat terrain, we know we move at about 3 km / hour, including a break.  We were travelling very irregular terrain and our time estimates for distance were off.  Signage with distances to campsites were only at campsites, not in between.  Our challenge was when we were getting tired we needed to know how much farther we had to go.

Then we started noticing the characteristics of the campsites we had seen so for – these were the criteria that gave us clues about how to look for the next campsite for which we so desperately longed.   We grew new navigational antennae…

Figure 2 - Curator Lake from the Notch (Photo Credit: B. Sanders)

Campsite criteria:  As we came through the Notch and looked out over Curator Lake, we were ready to quit for the day. We were tired and we had no idea how far we had to go before we could stop for the day.  The pass on the horizon, just right of center in Figure 2, was part of tomorrow’s trek.  Just above Curator lake, in Figure 2, is a green area.  We made the correct assumption that somewhere in there we would find our campsite.  The vast majority of the terrain was not suitable for any kind of temporary settlement.  This green area off in the distance was the only place we could see that met campsite criteria:

  1. An easily accessible water source
  2. Protection from the elements
  3. Land suitable for setting up shelter (tents)
Figure 3 - Campsite organizing (Photo Credit: B. Sanders)

Campsite design:  Here what we noticed about how each campsite was organized:

  1. A place to set up shelter
  2. A place to cook and store food
  3. A place for human waste (toilet)
The trail and the campsites are described by Parks Canada as primitive.  These are very basic places to settle for a bit and they are fully in relationship with the surrounding habitat.  The way the sites are organized are for primarily the safety of hikers – the places we prepare and store our food are entirely separate from where we will spend the night.  This is for our safety and the wildlife.
A suitable settlement takes into account its surroundings – its habitat – and the needs of the settlers.  In today’s life conditions, we are not looking to establish new settlements.  We are recalibrating our settlements – our cities – to suit our needs. Increasingly, we are are again taking into account our relationship with our surrounding habitat.  We are making our way toward suitable settlements and finding new ways of navigating that will ensure we reach this goal.  We just need to know what we are aiming for.
My next post will put me back on track with my exploration of 12 evolutionary intelligences in our city life.

 

 

 

Cities are alive

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:
  1. How can we optimize the life of people in the city?
  2. 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:
  1. Sustain healthy bio-physical, psychological, cultural and social life
  2. Create and replenish the life conditions that support life
  3. 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…

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[1] Marilyn Hamilton, Integral City, p. 95

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If you are interested in learning more about evolutionary intelligences relating to cities, you will be interested in the Integral City eLaboratory – Co-Creating the Future of the Human Hive