Meshing hierarchies and self-organizing

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-11/video-3-d-brain-image-highlights-neuronal-circuits-highest-resolution-ever
Photo Credit: Stanford Medecine

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 sitehere 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.

 

 

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[1] Marilyn Hamilton, Integral City, p. 221-222

[2] Marilyn Hamilton, Integral City, p. 223

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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

Emerging intelligence of the city

This post is the 5th in a series outlining Marilyn Hamilton’s 12 evolutionary intelligences.  We have seen how integral intelligence and ecosphere intelligence are crucial to the successful evolution of cities.  Both of these intelligences, for Hamilton, are critical to learning a new language about cities that helps us contemplate cities as whole systems of integral systems.

Emerging intelligence is about seeing wholeness and aliveness in the city.  It is also about looking for more than we usually see.

In this post, I will highlight the sense Hamilton makes of this form of intelligence and reveal the sense that I make about how this intelligence shapes our work in and for cities and citizens.

First, consider that cities are alive.  Hamilton draws on scientists such as Fritjof Capra (his book Web of Life), and what he tells us about the qualities of aliveness.  To be alive means that a system:

  1. survives,
  2. connects to its environment, and
  3. regenerates
Reflecting on my previous blogs, I can see that cities as systems behave this way.  So let’s contemplate each of these three elements of the city as a system.

The city survives

Each city is a whole system that survives.  Cities have survived for many generations, decades, centuries and millennia. If it survives, it is alive.  It is, as a system, also an alive ‘whole’.  Another scientist comes into Hamilton’s view: Arthur Koestler, who coined the term ‘holon‘ to describe a whole system.   Each whole is a holon.  The holons of the city are articulated in Hamilton’s nested holarchy of city systems.

The city, as a holon, is made of other several smaller wholes, or holons.  Each their own whole, identifiable system.  Seeing the city this way it is easy to discern what Hamilton calls the “massive interconnections” between the holons that make up a city.  It is a series of relationships that are both dynamic and stable.
The alive city is not made up of parts that can be easily disassembled and assembled.  The city is “a whole system of the human species that has characteristics as a whole that transcend but include communities, organizations, groups, families and individuals and the built environment that we have created to contain us [1].”  Cities are alive because they are made of wholes that are alive.

The city connects to its environment

Hamilton astutely ascertains that the second quality of aliveness is really about adaptiveness. Cities are very connected to habitat; their existence relies on our ecosphere intelligence.   As I explored in Chapter 1, everything we think, make and do is our work, our economic life, and it is always in response to the changing conditions around us.  In particular the physical conditions we are given or created by us.  We are the mechanism by which cities adjust.  As individuals adapt to internal and external life conditions, so too our neighbourhoods and cities[2].  In part and in whole, citizens and city aim to survive and we regularly adapt to ensure our survival.
This back and forth relationship between ourselves and our habitat is what creates our resilience – in ourselves and our cities.  Our adaptiveness is our “capacity to survive under conditions of stress [3].”  This back and forth is also what allows evolution to emerge.

The city regenerates

Our evolving relationship with our city habitat also results in the regeneration of our cities.  Our internal relationships with each other, the makers of cities in all our wholes, are what create city regeneration: “regeneration occurs through inner renewal, shared learning and teaching and coaching others in roles, competencies and capacities, inevitably in collective groupings [4].”  The city’s adaptiveness depends on the adaptiveness of the holons that make up the city.

_____ _____ _____

 

Emergence is about the creation of new capacities to respond appropriately to the changing conditions around us.  Hamilton questions whether the “emerging city” might have more traction than the “sustainable city”.  It just might, particularly when “emerging” connotes adaptiveness.  But this is new, unfamiliar language.  “Sustainable Development” was also at one time new, unfamiliar language, but perhaps it isn’t about naming the language just yet.
Our work is about naming the intention – to be keenly adaptive to our changing conditions.  Hamilton issues a more distinct intention than this: “to add value to life on Earth that is both sustainable (not over-using resources) adn emergent (always creating new capacities from existing resources) [5].”  This is our emerging intelligence.  It is what allows us to thrive.
My next post take a closer look at first of the four quadrants of integral theory applied to the city: inner intelligence and conscious capacity.  
 

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

 



[1]   Marilyn Hamilton, Integral City, p. 30-31

[2]   Marilyn Hamilton, Integral City, p. 28-33

[3]   Marilyn Hamilton, Integral City, p. 35

[4]   Marilyn Hamilton, Integral City, p. 37

[5]   Marilyn Hamilton, Integral City, p. 49

 

Conditions for evolutionary expansion

Our impulse to work to improve our world is an impulse to evolve.

I suspect that you recognize a deep impulse to survive and thrive in you, in other individuals, your family, your community, your nation and in the whole of us as a species. When faced with hardships and challenges, we do what it takes to protect ourselves and our clan, to survive.  We don’t often think of this, but it is ever present in our actions.  What is also present is our impulse as a species to thrive –to learn how to grow and change and adapt constantly.  Survival alone is not good enough.  We are always seeking more of what is possible in the world.  This is an impulse that even drives the creation of cities.

The last two posts, A primer on the emerging spiral and 7 principles that frame the Spiral, lay out one way of seeing how new value systems emerge within us as we evolve:  Spiral Dynamics.  As we move up the Spiral, our awareness and understanding expands as we meet ever more complex challenges in life.  Clare Graves called this movement up the Spiral a never ending quest.  Our evolutionary expansion, however, is not a given.

Potential for expansion – six conditions

Beck and Cowan outline six conditions that need to be in place for upward change on the Spiral to be possible.  Keep in mind that this is not a recipe – it is possible that most conditions are met and change does not occur.  It is also possible that only some conditions are met and change occurs anyway.  This is a pattern that offers some insight into how change happens, but more specifically, about the conditions in place as we move upward along the Spiral, at various scales – individuals, families, groups, organizations, nations, species.

1.  Openness to the potential for change.  Beck and Cowan are very clear that not all people are equally open to, or even capable or prepared for change.  Normally, humans are in a potentially open system of need, values and aspirations, but “we tend, however, to settle into what appears to be a closed state wherein we operate in a consistent, enduring steady way.  Once reached, we tend to stay in these zones of comfort… unless powerful forces induce turbulence.”[1]  So the potential for change revolves around three elements: thinking that is open, or at least arrested; having the appropriate intelligences, ie the ability to operate under more complex life conditions; and being free from restrictive patterns, ‘sink-holes’ and ‘baggage’.

Beck and Cowan distinguish three states in which we may find ourselves relative to potential for change[2] that I have organized as follows:

Openness to the potential for change

2.  Solutions.  Change will not occur if ‘serious, unresolved problems or threats still exist within the present state’.  Satisfying this condition involves: adequately managing the problems at their vMEME level creating comfort and balance; and direct excess energy to exploration of the next, more complex system.[3]

3.  Dissonance.  “Change does not occur unless the boat rocks.”[4]  The sensation of dissonance is stirred when the waves of some kind of impact jostle the steady-state system.  The factors that create dissonance are (verbatim)[5]:

  • Awareness of the growing gap between life conditions and current means for handling those problems.
  • Enough turbulence to create a sense that ‘something is wrong’ without so much chaos that the whole world seems to be falling apart.
  • Abject failure of old solutions to solve the problems of the new life conditions may stimulate fresh thinking, release energy, and liberate the next vMEMES along the Spiral

4.  Barriers[6].  Beck and Cowan discern two steps in this process. The first is recognizing the barriers, which typically are external.  ‘It’s their fault.’  ‘The bloody establishment holds us down.’  The second step invites exploration into why the barriers are effective obstacles, which reveals both internal and external obstacles. In the end, we have to clean up both the world outside and inside.

So barriers need to be eliminated, bypassed, neutralized or reframed into something else to provide the needed solid foundation on which to build change.  But all this is to be done conscious of risks, consequences and the pain of barrier removal, as well as exposure of the excuses and rationalizations for not implementing change.

5.  Insight.  When leading change, it is critical to understand the thinking systems in play, and discern the different patterns, models and structure that come with those ways of thinking.  Further, “alternative scenarios must be active in the collective consciousness before they can be considered.  Too often they are guarded in the minds of an elite few ‘planners’ or ‘decision-makers’.  People need mental pictures of what things might be like for them in their own real Life Conditions, not for some distant Hollywood start or textbook case-studies.”[7]

Change is ultimately about changing patterns, and Beck and Cowan offer the following ways to initiate change in patterns[8]:

  • Greater insight into how systems form, decline, and reform – particularly one’s own.  People must accept the possibility of change as well as the means.
  • Put a stop to wasteful regressive searches into out-moded answers from the past which simply cannot address greater complexity in the present.
  • Consider optional scenarios, fresh models, and experiences from applicable sources.  Scout the competition and demonstrate concretely what alternatives look like.
  • Quickly recognize the appearance of new life conditions and the vMEMES required to shift into congruence. Custom tailor for best fit.

6.  Consolidation.  Beck and Cowan say this best: “When significant change occurs, you can expect a period of confusion, false starts, long learning curves, and awkward assimilation.  Those who change – either as individuals or as organizations – may be punished by those who do not understand what is happening and now find themselves left out, misaligned and threatened.  Old barriers may be rebuilt in the form of punitive rules, turf battles and power tests.  New obstacles might be set up.  Sometimes, you will have to go around, let the bridge burn and not look back.”[9]

Conclusion

There is a gap that sits between how we experience the world and how we see the world could be that propels us forward.  This is not a gap that we all see in the same way at the same time.  It is not a gap that we are all even able to see, nor are we all required to see a gap before making attempts to cross it.  But there is always a gap, should we choose to notice it, examine it, explore it and cross it.  We are always at a threshold.

My next post will explore the word “change” from a Spiral perspective, and the difference between changeability and adjustability.  When at a threshold, when is it appropriate to change or adjust?


Notes

[1]   Beck and Cowan, Spiral Dynamics, p. 76

[2]   Beck and Cowan, Spiral Dynamics, p. 76-82.  The text.

[3]   Beck and Cowan, Spiral Dynamics, p. 82

[4]   Beck and Cowan, Spiral Dynamics, p. 82

[5]   Beck and Cowan, Spiral Dynamics, p. 83

[6]   Beck and Cowan, Spiral Dynamics, p. 83

[7]   Beck and Cowan, Spiral Dynamics, p. 84

[8]   Beck and Cowan, Spiral Dynamics, p. 84

[9]   Beck and Cowan, Spiral Dynamics, p. 85

 

Pause for evolutionary understanding

Figure 1 - City Habitats

If the purpose of cities is to grow and evolve the human species, then it is necessary to understand the evolutionary forces in play.  There are huge implications for our relationships with each other as we create cities that support our efforts to learn both as individuals and as a species

In today’s world we are in the process of recalibrating how we relate with each other.  We are adjusting our relationships with smartphones, texting and social media.  We are in contact with each other, both locally and globally, in whole new and unforeseen ways.  Information is distributed very quickly. We are both more informed and misinformed.  We are deeply engaged in life and rewiring the nature of our engagement with self and other and the city in our city life.

The advent of social media does not remove our desire to create cities that serve us well, or minimize our desire for face-to-face contact.  We still hunger for it.  We use social media to organize ourselves – to share information, to rally, to have fun.  Ultimately it is a form of connecting.  As communication sparked an evolutionary burst in humans 60,000 years ago, and with the printing press more recently, we are sparking another evolutionary burst now – where do we need to put our attention to ride it out safely? 

Figure 2 - City "Nestworking"

Organizing ourselves into and within cities is a process of organizing human intelligence.  Looking back at Chapter 1 – The City Impulse, we can see that we are organizing our economic life in the context of our physical habitat.  We are doing this by creating a social habitat that allows for feedback and integration (Figure 1). There is no ‘plan’, per se, but as my colleagues Don Beck and Marilyn Hamilton would say, there are patterns in the life conditions. One of the patterns is the activity of planning our cities. In Chapter 2 – The Planning Impulse, I propose that planning is one of many activities we undertake to organize ourselves.  The Venn diagram in Figure 2 articulates the planning of our cities as an activity that is non-linear, messy and uncomfortable work for an uncertain future.

Our attention needs to be on cities –  because cities are a source of innovation.  The development of cities is a survival skill for the human species.  Moreover, as we organize ourselves in cities, we need to pause and learn about ourselves and our evolutionary trip before diving further into the Nest City model (Figure 2).  That is the focus of the upcoming series of posts that form Chapter 3 – The Thriving Impulse, where I will describe and explore:

  1. Evolutionary intelligence
  2. Evolutionary intelligence in the city
  3. Protocols and practices that support the evolution of the city

A new era of planning cities

I keep asking myself if planning is the right word any more to describe this organizing activity that takes place in our cities.  It is the right word if it can hold a lot more than a tidy, linear, mechanical, rational practice.  There is a time for this kind of work, but planning can and should be much more to accommodate the messy, uncertain, complex world we live in.

Of all the organizing we do, planning can simply be act of declaring a destination and the steps it will take to get there.  At the end of my last post, Recalibrating the purpose of planning, I left you with a diagram (Figure 1) noting that planning also involves the ability to learn and adapt along the way (journey) in order to accommodate a future that we have know way of knowing will actually be (emergence).  Our planning work shapes the future but does not define our future.

Figure 1 - City "Nestworking"

A new era of organizing our cities is emerging that is much more conscious of collective intention and purpose to drive our work.  I see a different kind of planning that doesn’t reject the work we already do, but adds to it and informs it.  It is time to build upon the mechanical processes and plans we have created.  There is a time and place for them, but like any tool, just because we like the took does not mean we ought to use it everywhere.  When we pretend to have control we thwart our ability to thrive as both citizens and as whole communities.  We sabotage the potency of our collective wisdom.  It is time to learn how to live with the messy, uncertain world – an plan accordingly.

We are not comfortable in a messy world, so our tendency to seek control actually reduces our ability to reach our destination.  We choose to ignore feedback that tells us something we would rather not hear.  This new era of planning is complex yet very effective – if we get out of the way.  Every day, every moment, we live with tension as we discern what we can control and what we can not.  This work is as much about our inner selves as it is about the work we do in the world.

Cities are growing and we are growing with them. We are organizing ourselves in response to life conditions, which are as varied as the purposes of a city are varied.  In fact, being in service to a city’s varied efforts to organize itself in response to life conditions is a role for the people that build the city, the people that manage the city, civil society and citizens. There is a role and responsibility for everyone to support a city’s efforts to notice, adjust and organize for the purposes of creating the conditions for citizens to survive and thrive.

I will next tackle Chapter Three – The Thriving Impulse, to explore what it means to thrive, a foundational piece before presenting how Nest City thinking works in Parts Two and Three.

I leave you today, at the end of Chapter 2 – The Planning Impulse, with the wise words of Ben Okri.

Recalibrating the purpose of planning

Figure 1 - Evolving City Purposes

The activity of planning cities is a kind of work that has emerged with cities.  It is a mode of organizing that began in Canada with land surveyors and engineers. The work of planners and planning in Canada is recent; Canada’s Commission of Conservation hired Britain’s Thomas Adams in 1914 as its Town Planning Advisor. His work supported the creation of town planning legislation across Canada, and a whole new area of work distinct from that of surveying and engineering.  For Adams, the additional focus of planning was to improve civic conditions[1].  This was the beginning of a structure (legislation) and a profession dedicated to contributing order to settlements across Canada, work that emerged with the fourth purpose of the city (Figure 1), and the fourth level of organizing (Figure 2).  (For more on the evolution of city purposes and modes of organizing, please see Is the unplanned city unplanned? Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4).

Figure 2 - Evolving Modes of Organizing

The activity of planning our communities – even just thinking about planning – has played a critical role in the shape our communities today.  Gerald Hodge and David L. A. Gordon, authors of Canada’s primary text for students of planning Canadian communities, note:

…the regard for planning and making plans is strong.  Even in… contentious situations, the essential debate is not about the need for planning, but for better planning – not whether but how it should be done.”[2] 

Citizens, developers and builders, civil society and our various public institutions and politicians are always ready to tell planners about needed improvements. And they are right – there are many improvements to be made.  What we ought to be wary of is the assumption that it is up to planners to make the changes.

Today’s challenge – recalibrating the purpose of planning, plans and planners

This is the challenge that faces planners, citizens and decision-makers today: our communities function with an extended focus, broadened purpose and less concentrated decision-making processes. The formal act of ‘planning’ as we recognize it today, with zoning by-laws and area structure plans, is in response to life conditions of a certain time, geography, challenges, and social circumstances.  It is as set of activities that fits the era in which Thomas Adams worked. In today’s world the work of organizing a city belongs to many.  The planning profession is simply one of many kinds of work.  The work of organizing ourselves to thrive belongs to all of us.  In 1922, Thomas Adams stated: “Cities do not grow – all of them are planned.”[3]  It is as though we build them as we build a building, with a complete set of plans.  That just doesn’t happen with cities.  They do grow.

None of this means that plans and planning are not relevant.  Plans do have a purpose. Having a plan means that we know where we are going and what it will take to get there.  A plan documents our shared purpose, intention and intended actions to reach our goals.  In every aspect of life, this is a critical function.  Specific to city planning, Hodge and Gordon describe it this way: a plan is “for the purpose of achieving a goal desired by its citizens… community planning is about attaining a preferred future built and natural environment.”[4]  They cite two reasons why a community makes plans: to solve some problems associated with its development; and/or to achieve some preferred form of development.[5]  This is work that makes a meaningful contribution to cities.

In conventional planning circles, the professional planners are charged with this work.  Citizens, civil society, civic builders and developers along with politicians provide feedback to planners through formal public engagement activities.  Yet we are growing into an understanding that city hall is not the only player who organizes a city, but that there are many others involved.  Numerous organizations, activities and events shape the city without city hall’s direction.  Environmental groups have had an influence on our tolerance for weeds.  Arts foundations find the funds to build new museums and art galleries.  Business leaders join forces to advance technology research and innovation.  The university hospital chooses to emphasize health research and expands its facilities.  School boards decide to allow families to choose their schools.  Citizens choose where to live in relation to employment/schools/services.  All and each of these players shape our complex cities.

Citizens, civil society, civic builders and developers are increasingly demanding a role in the process of planning our communities.  Even departments inside city hall are hungry for ways to integrate their work with planners.  As a result, the role of the plan has evolved into something new.  City plans are no longer simply the blueprint early land surveyors and engineers prepared for orderly development.  A new kind of work is being called for that supports an expanded view of what it takes to make cities that are healthy habitats for citizens.

The value of plans is in their intention and common direction.  They are now more about shape and spirit, rather than control.  There are times when control is important, but the scope of planning is widening and more and more aspects of planning are about much more than control.  As an activity, planning has to hold a destination in mind, allow for learning and adjustment along the way, and recognize that we do not know exactly what we are going to end up with and we can’t control that.  Part Two and Part Three of this writing endeavour will flesh out how to organize ourselves with kind of understanding.  For the moment I offer this:

Figure 3 - City "Nestworking"

The next post will conclude Chapter 2 – The Planning Impulse with a question: Is planning even the right word any more?   Chapter  3 – The Thriving Impulse, will be a theory side trip into what it means to thrive before thoroughly exploring the City Nestworking model above for the remainder of the book in Part 2 – Organizing for Emergence and Part 3 – Nest City.  



[2]   Gerald Hodge and David L.A. Gordon, Planning Canadian Communities, p. 3

[3]   As quoted by Hodge and Gordon

[4]   Gerald Hodge and David L.A. Gordon, Planning Canadian Communities, p. 5

[5]   Gerald Hodge and David L.A. Gordon, Planning Canadian Communities, p. 5

 

Other Sources –

Beck, Don Edward and Cowan, Christopher C., Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership, and Change, Blackwell Publishing Ltd., Oxford (2006), particularly pages 52-56.

Hamilton, Marilyn, Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive, New Society Publishers Inc., Gabriola Island (2008)

Sanders, Beth, “From the High Water Mark to the Back of the Fish Flakes: The Evolutionary Purpose of Cities,” Vol 51, No. 4, p 26-31, Plan Canada.  Print publication of the Canadian Institute of Planners.


Is an unplanned city unplanned? Part 3

St. John's Today - The Battery

As for any city, the shape of St. John’s is derived from its geography, its purpose, the activities within and in connection to other cities (see part 1 and part 2).  There was no master plan for St. John’s to become what it became.  The shape and character of St. John’s did not take place because of a single dream, or a single person, or even a single authority.  In times of colonial expansion, the geography of St. John’s provided ice-free shelter at the Eastern edge of North America.  The settlement was established where it made sense to be.

In the end, colonial authorities and the people living in St. John’s gave it its shape.   Military personnel, governors, port authority officials, businessmen, church leaders, servants and the patterns of how families met their needs all shaped the city.  They organized themselves to make sure they had what they needed to survive and thrive as individuals, as a settlement and as an Empire.   Collectively, they knew what it would take to run the fishery from the port of St. John’s and they did it.

St. John’s continues to adjust and organize as conditions change; it keeps what it values and moves on and away from what it does not:

  1. The Rooms, St. John’s seat of cultural identity that provides public access to history, heritage and art, overlooks the harbor from the site of its seat of military identity: Fort Townshend.

    The Rooms, overlooking St. John's Harbour (http://cruisetheedge.com/galleryimages/9%20The%20Rooms.jpg)
  2. The fish flakes no longer surround the harbor, but the unplanned city survives as a cultural hub and tourism asset.  It is woven into today’s St. John’s.  The public access to pathways on Signal Hill from Outer Battery Road passes over a home’s deck, less than a metre from the home’s front door.
  3. The St. John’s Port Authority continues to serve local, regional and international trade requirements.  It’smission is to provide reliable, economic and efficient port services in support of Canadian trade, fostering regional economic development and serving Newfoundland and Labrador’s distribution requirements.

Purpose and Life Conditions

Figure 1 - City Purposes

Life conditions vary from city to city, each adjusting and organizing itself – and adjusting its purpose as appropriate.  The St. John’s example highlights five distinct purposes (1-5 in Figure 1): individual survival, collective survival, power, authority and prosperity.  (More on this spiral in Chapter 3 – The Thriving Impulse.)  Each of these has its own trajectory that shapes St. John’s over time.  In practice, each of these purposes involves integration of the local needs of individuals and the city, with relationships with other cities – a necessary condition for the city’s survival that is clearly still a focus for St. John’s.

The St. John’s example illuminates principles about how cities fundamentally take their shape:

  1. The purpose of a city guides its form and shape
  2. The purpose of a city, as it adjusts and shifts, becomes diffused
  3. As the purpose of a city becomes diffused, its purpose expands to serve the diffused needs
  4. As the purpose becomes more diffused, decision-making is made by a wider group of individuals to accommodate this expansion
  5. All of the above occurs within the context of the city’s life conditions

St. John’s was not planned to be what it is today, but it is certainly  not unintentional.  Is that enough to say that it is unplanned?  It did what it needed to do in each stage of its development.  Does ‘planning’ mean that it should have done more than respond to the life conditions at each stage of development?  Or are there degrees of planning that correspond to evolving city purposes.

The overriding purpose of a city is to integrate the needs of its people, with its context, to create a habitat in which people will survive and thrive.  This is the fundamental context in which we all work.  And a profession (new work) emerged among us to help us collectively accomplish this: city planning.

‘Planning’ a city is simply an activity that supports our collective work to organize ourselves to ensure our habitat serves us well.  The activity of planning emerged when our life conditions required additional order; Our planning activities will adjust as we need different kinds of order.  

“Is an unplanned city unplanned?” will conclude with a description of the evolution of the role of planning and planning practitioners as our cities evolve.  


Sources –

Beck, Don Edward and Cowan, Christopher C., Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership, and Change, Blackwell Publishing Ltd., Oxford (2006), particularly pages 52-56.

Hamilton, Marilyn, Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive, New Society Publishers Inc., Gabriola Island (2008)

Sanders, Beth, “From the High Water Mark to the Back of the Fish Flakes: The Evolutionary Purpose of Cities,” Vol 51, No. 4, p 26-31, Plan Canada.  Print publication of the Canadian Institute of Planners.

Is the unplanned city unplanned? Part 4

What is the role of planning and planners if the overriding purpose of a city is to integrate the needs of its people, with its context, to create a habitat in which people survive and thrive?  Simply, ‘planning’ a city is an activity that supports our collective work to organize ourselves into, and in, cities with the objective of ensuring that our habitat serves us well.

Modes of organizing

Figure 1 - City Purpose Spiral

In Is an unplanned city unplanned? Part 3 , I introduced a spiral of evolving city purposes (Figure 1).  With each level of purpose of the city, there is a corresponding mode of organizing.

500 years ago, when St. John’s harbor was settled (see Part 1 and Part 2), choices were made to ensure people’s individual survival and that of the settlement. They took advantage of a geographic location in proximity to Europe and a calm harbour that didn’t freeze, two geographic factors that contribute to the harbour’s role in transatlantic shipping today.  Specific to the settlement itself, they ensured a supply of fresh water and materials to build shelter.  Decisions were made in response to context to ensure survival, and once immediate survival needs were met, they began organizing themselves.

Figure 2- City Organizing Spiral

Four levels of organizing (Figure 2) are evident in early St. Johns: reacting (survival), gathering (collective survival), doing (power and might), and planning (authority and moral codes).  In the early days of St. John’s people did what needed to be done.  Activities were coordinated – the port authority, the court house, government house, custom house.  Resources were coordinated – water supply, roads.  Likely in ‘do’ mode, decisions were made by the governor about where to locate the church, the various government buildings.  In ‘do’ mode, forts were constructed.  In ‘do’ mode, the homes and fishery in support of the fort were constructed.  As authority was needed, it arrived.

Once our survival needs are met, we are able to expand our view and consider others.  We gather with others to make meaning of what has happened and what will happen.  We work together to survive and begin the journey to thrive – in the pub or church.  When things need to be done, we meet to sort out what to do.  Some individuals will just do what needs to be done and set up fish flakes wherever it works.  Build a dock where it works.  This can feel unruly, and when sufficiently so, someone will try to give structure to things – in the case of St. John’s we the Port Authority, government house, custom house, the court house.

In St. John’s, the ‘doing’ also takes place at the scale of nations: the British, French, Spanish and Portuguese all want to claim the fishery and access to the fishery.  In ‘doing’ mode, they build kingdoms and lay claim to territory.  As time goes on, hints of plans take root in St. John’s.  And plans come with authority to make sure that the plan is implemented.  St. John’s’ early maps reveal how this took place: pipes for water supply, the custom house (and its rules), road construction, property ownership, and who occupies premises.  In response to our life conditions we organize as appropriate (Figure 2).

A sixth purpose for cities

The fifth purpose for cities is to generate prosperity for its citizens, in thriving economies, a mitigation of the rules that emerged from authorities, and a renewed sense of entrepreneurial spirit and creativity.  In St. John’s this id evident in the corporate structure for the St. John’s Port Authority: users of the port, City of St. John’s, the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador and the Government of Canada.  This is partnership, not a central authority simply consulting with stakeholders.  And while not a ‘city’ organization, it certainly shapes St. John’s.

A sixth purpose is emerging for today’s cities (Figure 1): to create the conditions for people to fully access our diversity of knowledge.  We are growing into an understanding that city hall is not the only player who organizes a city but that there are many others involved: chambers of comer, community foundations, advocacy groups, developers and builders, citizens, health authorities, school systems, provincial and federal government, citizens, etc.  All and each of these players shape our increasingly complex cities.  They are increasingly demanding a role in the process of creating our cities.

The planning profession – new work

The formal act of planning our cities emerged as new work when we required additional order in response to life conditions of a certain time, geography, challenges and social circumstances.  Planning in Canada is a fairly recent phenomenon: The Town Planning Institute of Canada was established in 1919, later turning into the Canadian Institute of Planners in 1974.  Further evolution of the profession has involved the regulation of the profession by provincial governments in recent decades:  Alberta, New BrunswickNova ScotiaOntario, Quebec and Saskatchewan.

Today, we see the formal act of planning land uses in municipal legislation: zoning by-laws, area structure plans, municipal development plans and official community plans.  In their work, planners help us organize our social and community services, build economic capacity, address transportation and infrastructure needs, manage cultural and heritage resources, ensure environmental protection.  The Canadian Institute of Planners defines planning as:

the scientific, aesthetic, and orderly disposition of land, resources, facilities and services with a view to securing the physical, economic and social efficiency, health and well-being of urban and rural communities.  

While this definition is complicated, it is clear that the planning profession is in place to help the city be the best it can be for its residents.

Two roles for planning today

The challenge for citizens and planners today is to recognize two different kinds of planning support to cities:

  1. Provide the answers – traditional, linear, planning expertise.
  2. Create a habitat for exploration – support the city’s awareness so it can respond purposefully, appropriately.

The difference between the two is simple: planners have expert knowledge vs. citizens have expert knowledge.  There are times when the specific expertise of planners is needed.  This is “top-down” activity, which is the right thing under certain circumstances.  The second role, however, requires acknowledgement that a city is trying to organize itself and there is work to be done to help the city see itself (more on this, what Marilyn Hamilton calls integral vital signs monitoring, in later posts).  To get what we need from our cities, we each need to be in tune to what our cities need of us.  This means honing our telling and listening skills in our work in the world. We need to notice not what we want to do, but what is being asked of us.  This is where the next evolutionary step will emerge for the profession – a profession in service to cities and their inhabitants.

Planners are relevant when supporting the work of a whole city to organize itself.  Individually and collectively, planners support our work to improve our habitat.  Planners are well positioned to create the conditions for cities to see changing life conditions and for cities to figure out how to adjust.  Our work, then, is to create the conditions for ourselves, and our cities, to see and respond to life conditions.  Some of this work takes the form of planning as we know it, and some will take other forms.  The purpose of planning is to support city efforts to notice, adjust and organize to ensure people survive and thrive.

To answer the question, ‘Is the unplanned city unplanned?’, I note that all cities are organized to meet a purpose in a given context.  ‘Planning’ is only one mode of organizing.  The unplanned city is unplanned, but not created without purpose.  This is significant.  Planned cities don’t achieve their plans exactly anyway.  The real matter at hand is knowing the purpose(s) of cities.  Whether planned or unplanned, all cities are organized.

My next post will explore the voices that make a whole, integral city.

Sources –

Beck, Don Edward and Cowan, Christopher C., Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership, and Change, Blackwell Publishing Ltd., Oxford (2006), particularly pages 52-56.

Hamilton, Marilyn, Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive, New Society Publishers Inc., Gabriola Island (2008)

Sanders, Beth, “From the High Water Mark to the Back of the Fish Flakes: The Evolutionary Purpose of Cities,” Vol 51, No. 4, p 26-31, Plan Canada.  Print publication of the Canadian Institute of Planners.

Time to build the nest we need

The staggering rate of population and city growth alone are enough for me to recognize that something, at some point, is going to give.  We are going to have to adjust to something.  And given the rate of change, we are going to have to learn how to adjust quickly.  That means we have to welcome change, quickly examine what adjustments are necessary, and take timely, appropriate action.  Debating whether or not something is happening, such as green house gas emissions, is a distraction from what we need to do: learn how to organize ourselves to be adaptable.  Adaptability will ensure we survive and thrive and, as it turns out, adaptability is what got us here in the first place.

(This post concludes a series of 14 posts that constitute my first efforts to blog my book, Nest City: The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities.  For readers wanting to go to the first post, here is a link.  These first posts assemble into Chapter One: The City Impulse.)

Figure A - City Emergence Dynamic

There is within us an evolutionary impulse to do more than merely survive.  At the core of this impulse is our work – the efforts we make to innovate and find new ways of thinking, making and doing new things.  And this impulse to innovate generates cities (and cities generate innovation too).  Developing cities, then, is a survival skill.  And the role of our work – and our approach to our work – in cities can not be understated because it creates cities.  All of this happens in the context of our physical habitat (see Figure A).  Our ability to evolve, along with our cities, is a survival skill.

The dynamic relationship between our economic life – our work – and our habitat is only as healthy as the feedback that flows back and forth.  Cities are, in fact, a result of this relationship. In this dynamic, our social habitat is the conduit between our economic life and our physical habitat.  It is the sphere where we allow, or disallow, connections to be made between our economic life and our physical habitat.  It is where we create the conditions individually and collectively to notice what is happening around us and integrate our world with our work, our work with our world.  Or, more appropriately, where we integrate our cities with our work, our work with our cities.  Our cities need quality feedback.

Innovation hinges on looking at things in new ways, but it is the innovative quality of our work in the context of our habitat that drives whether a city declines or thrives, not just the fact that we are innovative.  More of the same work – without innovation and adaptation – makes us busy, but it does not mean we learn and grow.  More and more new work, for the sake of innovation, does not mean we adapt either.  Innovation in the context of our life conditions, which are constantly changing, means we adapt – and evolve.  Innovation + adaptation means we are thinking, making and doing new things.  This is a critical understanding in light of the challenges we face as a species with a quickly growing population.

As citizens we have choices about the work we do and our awareness of whether the work we do is responsive to our life conditions.  We must be brave enough to look at life conditions, let alone acknowledge them.  We must be brave enough to notice what is happening and to respond appropriately.  This bravery is needed at many scales – in citizens, in organizations, in cities, in society.  How do we create the conditions for this kind of courage?

Figure B

Jane Jacobs suggested that it is sensible to foster desirable new work and select from those worth fostering further.  Our evolutionary path isn’t about simple generating more and more and more new work, endless innovating.  The word ‘select’ implies that someone will do the selecting and that we know the criteria to choose the work that will work.  But we will never have criteria for this kind of work because we have never been here before.  Each moment ahead of us is new, and the criteria we have used for previous situations are criteria for previous situations – not the present or the future.  But it is a far more diffused, yet simple, process than that.  We need to know the direction we face and we need to ‘notice’ what works along the way, to get us there.

The work ahead of us is about creating cities – our habitat – that allow us to change the work we do and how we go about doing it.  It is about creating cities, right now, that work for us.  The challenge is recognizing that our work, whether paid or unpaid, and our desire to improve our work is an innovation-generating evolutionary impulse.   This impulse is the force that creates  and recreates cities, which in turn creates the conditions for further innovation.  We shape the city and in return it shapes us.  We build the nest that nurtures us.  It is time to notice how we go about organizing ourselves to get what we need from this relationship.

Figure C

We have never been here before.  We are at a point in time unlike any other and our efforts to understand the world in the ways we have always tried to understand the world are not accurate.  We face together a world full of uncertainty and unpredictability.  Any actions we take as individuals and as collectives have unexpected ripple effects in ways we can not contemplate or anticipate, which means that each of us is connected to others in significant and unimaginable ways.  We are in this experiment of humanity together.  To be dynamically stable – to steer well – we need to be willing to receive feedback and we need to explicitly seek feedback, even if it is telling us information we do not want to hear.  We need this feedback to do our work well, and our cities need this feedback as well.  We simply need to be awake to notice things around us.

This will take great courage, because to invite honest feedback is to invite hearing that we are not getting the results we would like.  It is time for us to organize ourselves in such a way that we are clear about our destination, that we provide ourselves with the support we need to be courageous enough to be awake on the journey, and we create the conditions for success within our world of unpredictability by self-organizing so the best possible way forward will emerge.  It is time to consciously create our nest city.  It is time to jump into the driver’s seat of our own evolution.

The next series of posts will revolve around what it means to plan our cities.  Are cities really planned?  What patterns can be discerned in how we go about creating our cities?  The dynamic that generates cities is not linear, yet our current efforts in North America to create sustainable cities are limited to linear approaches.  The next round of posts will make the case that a new way of designing for cities that serve their citizens well is emerging.  You can aid an abet its emergence by exploring these questions:

 

What can my city do for me?

What can I do for my city?

What can our city do for us?

What can we do for our city?

 

 

Note –
For those interested in exploring the preceding posts that form Chapter One: The City Impulse, here they are in order:
  1. Are people growing cities or are cities growing people?
  2. Driven to do more than merely survive
  3. Cities are engines of innovation
  4. The development of cities is a survival skill
  5. The work we do creates our cities
  6. Evolving cities is a survival skill
  7. Be a part of feedback loops in your city
  8. Cities: the result of our evolving interaction with our habitat
  9. Cities need quality feedback from habitat
  10. Dynamically steering cities into the future
  11. Work at scale to serve the city
  12. Inter-city tournaments
  13. The city as a nest

 

The city as a nest

Thinking of our cities as nests means we understand that our cities are what we build for ourselves.  Like other species we build our most immediate habitat: our shelter from the elements.  We also build structures that, once our survival needs are met, nurture our families and our well-being.  As a collective, we build larger and larger communities that address the needs of more than just a family.  Over the course of our evolution we build infrastructure to protect ourselves and our livelihoods (fortifications) and we build infrastructure to ensure order (transportation systems, government facilities).  We also build infrastructure to enjoy the opportunities that present themselves to enjoy life (recreation facilities, art galleries, sports arenas, etc.).  All of this is enabled because of our relationship with the resources that surround the beginnings of settlement and the subsequent work we have developed and expanded over decades, centuries and millenia.

Consider a simple definition of nest – a place or structure made or chosen:

  • in which to lay and incubate eggs or give birth to young
  • where a number of animals of the same species and their young occupying a common habitat: an ants’ nest
  • where an animal or insect breeds or shelters: an ants’ nest

The qualities of a nest are various.  A nest has some density.  Perhaps as a snug retreat, or tucked away all by itself, it is where a concentration of a species calls home.  A nest is also warm, safe and comfortable.  Whether a nest for birds, or a nest of shredded paper to hold a fragile bowl, a nest is a container that holds, protects and supports its contents.  A nest is pocket-like, usually a more or less circular structure.  It is a refuge from the elements.  It is home.

At a basic level, “nest” describes the habitat humans build for themselves very appropriately.  Our cities are made by us.  We build our homes and cities for ourselves as a species and with each generation.  More and more humans are choosing cities as their habitat.  In addition, cities provide heightened care for our young (specialized health care).

The qualities of a nest also coincide with those of a city.  People conglomerate in the city.  The city – at its best – provides shelter for more and more humans as more and more humans make cities their home.  At a minimum, we go to cities with the intention of making a better life, pursuing our work, looking for opportunities.  Geographical constraints aside, our cities take a circular form.  Cities are the habitat that holds, protects and supports the generation of new ways of thinking, making and doing new things.  Cities cultivate innovation, the very thing we need to ensure the cities we build are able to hold, protect and support us, citizens of the city.  We make the nest – the city – in which we settle.

In exploring definitions of nest, I found that as soon as the word nest is associated with humans, a shadow side emerges: a place filled with undesirable people, activity or things; a place or situation that is full of bad people or activities; or a place that fosters something undesirable.  The examples: a nest of spies, a nest of thievery.  It certainly is the case that as more and more good things happen in the city, more bad things will also take place.  The city is not a perfect phenomenon.  Our work in cities must acknowledge and attend to the healthy and unhealthy aspects of our nest.  Which do we wish our city nests to nurture?

We build our nest cities to serve ourselves – to survive and thrive.  We build our nest cities to allow us to grow and develop – to emerge into what we need to be in order to survive and thrive.  We have a choice about whether to create cities that serve us poorly or well.  They are the place from which we leap to new ways of thinking, making and doing new things.  They are the place from which we fly to new nests, as we reshape our cities and what happens in them now at an unprecedented rate.

Figure A

As we think about our nest cities and our relationship with them, we must consider the nested hierarchy of systems that make up the city (Figure A).  (Three posts have explored the nested hierarchy of city systems: Work at scale to serve the city, The development of cities is a survival skill, and Cities: the result of our evolving interaction with our habitat.)  A city is full of similar things of different sizes that fit inside each other, where the smaller element fits in a lower position in a hierarchy: a nest of tables, organisms classified in a series of nested sets.  This involves a set of things in graduated sizes that fit together.  The notion of hierarchy offers yet another way of looking at the city and its systems.

There is a lot for a Nest City to hold.  It is simple and complex and it is ever changing.  Knowing this changes how we look at our cities.  It changes how we design our cities.  It changes the very process by which we create our cities.  Nest City requires us to host ourselves and our evolution well.   

Nested elements of a city: economic, social and physical

Resources that may be of interest

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