Integral City

Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive

Marilyn Hamilton

• Publisher: Amaranth Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780998031750
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How are we evolving the human hive? 60% of humanity now lives in cities. Can city dwellers, like bees who pollinate the fields, act so intelligently that they add value to the planet? How can the clash of differences that separate people, purpose, profits, and priorities generate fresh energy to solve 21st-century VUCA problems? How do we propagate new pathways for community learning and give the 4 Voices of the city fresh hope?

For City Leaders, Business/Innovators, the 3rd Sector and Citizens, this book proposes 5sets of City Intelligences: Contexting, Individual, Collective, Strategic, and Evolutionary. It explores a new paradigm that senses, experiences, relates, and co-creates in—with and as the city—using an Integral consciousness.

Integral City recalibrates city intelligences with the Master Code of Care—for Self, Others, Place, and Planet. Its life-giving strategies reveal cities as Gaia’s Reflective Organs, evolving futures in space.

PART 1

Contexting Intelligences

This Part includes 4 chapters that address the contexting intelligences for the basic survival of human systems at the scale of the city. They frame the city in terms of:

1.Ecosphere Intelligence (for the contexts of climate, geology, geography and ecology)

2.Emerging Intelligence (for discerning complexity, adaptiveness and coherence)

3.Integral Intelligence (for integrating and mapping fractal wholeness of city realities)

4.Living Intelligence (for exploring the dynamic cycles of living and dying in, with and as the city).

ECOSPHERE INTELLIGENCE: LOCATING PLACES FOR THE HUMAN HIVE

Nectar and high-protein pollen are found only in insect-pollinated flowers;species that depend on wind pollination have very little nutrition to offer bees . . . Without bees to pollinate them, most flower species would perish.

— Gould and Gould, 1988, p. 20

“Natural capital” includes not only all the natural resources and waste sinks needed to support human economic activity, but also those biophysical processes and relationships among components of the ecosphere that provide essential life-support “services.”

— Rees and Wackernagel, 1994, p. 36

OPPORTUNITIES AND LIMITATIONS

All cities are not created equal. The longitudes and latitudes that mark our locations also demarcate the zones of planetary motion and time. But as efficient as they are, such man-made boundaries defy the cut and thrust of the geologies that shaped the crucibles of city environments and ecologies.

Moreover these boundaries cloud the evolution of geology as a natural process that lies clearly on the map of cosmology and the universe’s evolution over the last 14 billion years. Our third rock from the sun is embedded in the energy, matter and light from which all known reality has emerged. And when we view that context of time and space, the environment of cities suddenly becomes exciting, curious and awe-inspiring. Then we can see that the city’s true heritage spans the ever-complexifying evolutionary map from the galaxies to the solar system, the lithosphere, the hydrosphere, the atmosphere, the biosphere, the anthroposphere and finally civilization (see Figure 1.1) (Eddy, 2005). If we consider the start of civilization to be synonymous with the emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens, then we are looking at the city within the context of a very short history indeed. For if the first identifiable member of our species dates back approximately 100,000 years, then our first city is only about 5,000 years old.

Cities located in different geographies have emerged by solving the same core problems in different ways. We have lulled ourselves into thinking that the essential services of the city are listed on the directory of any city hall: land use, water management, waste management (solid and liquid), transportation, building. But few city halls concern themselves with essential “off-directory” services like food and energy supply, distribution and management, health care or education. In the Western (democratic capitalist/mixed economy) world, at least, those functions are left primarily to the private sector. And in the developing world, those functions are usually governed by another level of government. Thus we suffer from fragmentation and partitioning no matter what form of governance systems develops and maintains policy for cities. This is actually a dilemma of life or death, because we are failing to manage even the external environment of more than 50 percent of the human species (United Nations Human Settlements, 2005).

Figure 1.1. A brief history of the world.

Source: Eddy, 2005.

The point is, no matter where a city is located, these functions are being performed with or without intention. And how these functions are performed is being governed ultimately not by any human decisions but by the geographic environment of the city.

Thanks to the advances in blood-typing technology and the human genome study, we can now trace the journey of humanity (see Figure 1.2) from the savannahs of Africa, around the coastlines of the Indian subcontinent, over to Australia, up into Eurasia and around the shorelines and islands of the Pacific (Wells, 2002).

Geographers differ as to how they categorize the world’s geographies. Regardless of the classifications, Wells’ map of man’s and, therefore, humans’ journeys takes him to virtually every one. In a parallel fashion, author Felipe Fernandez-Armesto (Fernandez-Armesto, 2001) rewrites the history of human civilization based on 17 different geographies. He considers the history within the contexts of the following crucibles. (Note that this order reflects the map that Wells’ microscope discloses as the journeys’ sequence in Figure 1.2.)

Figure 1.2. Wells’ journey of humanity map.

Note: This map is derived from the science of population genetics, using data from the Y chromosome.

Source: Wells, 2002.

1.jungles

2.prairie and savanna

3.Eurasian steppes

4.temperate woodlands

5.tropical lowlands

6.swamps

7.dry alluvial soils

8.hills and mountains of the Old World

9.hills and mountains of the New World

10.small islands

11.Asian seashores

12.Mediterranean seashores

13.southern hemisphere seashores

14.North Atlantic seashore

15.desert sands

16.tundra

17.Arctic ice

Wherever man and woman have journeyed, they have had to ultimately sustain themselves through providing the basics of life: water, food, waste management, shelter, clothing and energy. Once sufficient population created cohesive settlements, they also created workplaces and transportation. Before we could read the portable record in our own body’s DNA through Wells’ population research on the Y chromosome—and the complementary DNA studies focusing on the female mitochondria, popularized in Seven Daughters of Eve (Sykes, 2002)—we passed along the stories of these varied environmental life conditions through song lines, epics and myths or simply discovered the remains of past settlements in ruins. Those secrets we have disclosed through archeological study and are always subject to interpretation and reinterpretation.

LESSONS FROM OTHER SPECIES

When we look at other species and their relationship to their natural environment (often called a territory), we can see that when they have evolved in large populations, like prairie dogs, rabbits or social insects, their histories run in cycles where overpopulation is balanced against the supply of the basic necessities of life. In most cases, that balance is maintained by the interlocking cycles of births and food supply. Where the latter meets or exceeds the needs of the former, births continue to rise. When it falls below the minimum needs, not only do births fall, but the population is reduced by deaths through famine and disease. Hobbs’ premodern view of the human experience of this cycle was that life is “nasty, brutish and short.”

However, with the science of systems thinking and complexity, we can find an example of a living system that transcends the limitations of this food-depletion cycle by creating an intelligent learning feedback loop. The honeybee seems to have developed a life-sustaining system that is focused not on the single bee but on the survival of the hive. The nature of the honeybee is instructive because the co-intelligence of the hive sustains not just a single life or even the hive’s life, but contributes to, i.e., adds value to, the flowers, fields and orchards that the bees pollinate.

I visualize an Integral City that is as much in synch with its environment as the honeybees are with theirs. An Integral City would live sustainably not just from resources taken from the environment, but because appropriate resources were intentionally returned to the environment. Thus a self-supporting seasonal feedback loop would operate. The beginnings of this possibility are now emerging through a convergence of positive and negative factors related to the food we eat.

On the positive side, movements like the slow food movement, which originated in Italy, are spreading around the world. Its tenets are to source your food locally, cook it in simple, traditional, taste-enhancing ways and share it in socially engaging dining experiences.

The growing institutionalization of eating locally, reported by Bill McKibben and the 100 Mile Diet (Smith & MacKinnon, 2007), are similar movements resulting from experiments by citizens and city agencies to procure locally sourced foods. These positive re-engagements of the city with its region are matched (at time of writing) by the terrifying specters of unsafe food practices in food-exporting countries where safety standards are lacking or unenforced, causing the introduction of everything from herbicides, pesticides and toxins to outright poisons. In addition, the practices of recycling animal parts to feed self-similar species (e.g., cattle offal manufactured into cattle feed) has led to scares like bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) (or its human equivalent Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, thought to be caused by the same agent). The mysterious and spontaneous appearance of avian flu, foot-and-mouth and other zoonotic diseases raises further concerns about not just where we source our food energy, but how we raise it in the first place.

These bleak experiences cast a garish light on the “end of Nature” argument (McKibben, 2007). Human activity is influencing the functioning of “nature”—but even though we have the hubris to assume that we know what we are doing, our innocence and ignorance about the massive entanglement of natural systems means that, at this stage of human development, we are more often wrong than right. Likewise for those who propose the “end of geography”—that globalization and technological development mean we are no longer subject to geographic constraints—I suggest that this is a premature conclusion. It smacks strongly of domination thinking, without the recognition that geography may be transcended by human systems but will also have to be included. For those who joust at the constraints that geography has offered the human race, I would invite them to expand their view of Earth-centered geography to solar system and galactic geography. Integral geography transcends and includes all these.

Nevertheless, as a result of these positive food-based (energy-resourcing) movements and negative (energy-depleting) dysfunctions, it is time to notice that there are many strategic reasons for the city to renegotiate its relationship with the country or ecoregion. When more people lived in the country than in the city, the relationship of country to city was close and interconnected. Now with this reversed, their relationship is fragmented, disconnected and unappreciated. An intelligent Integral City would nurture its ecoregion with integrity and awareness that their lives were intimately integrated.

As we count the costs and dangers of global warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels generating carbon dioxide, we can look at the food on our plates that has traveled on average 2,000 kilometers (Smith & MacKinnon, 2007) and reassess the real necessity that we renegotiate city relationships with ecoregion resources. It is fast becoming a mark of city responsibility as well as city resilience.

This new appreciation of our interconnections is also a sign of city maturity. It is as if until now we have lived in an era of city centricity, like egocentricity in the individual. And now we are passing into a time of ecoregional centricity, like family, clan and tribal centricity in an individual. If this trajectory of emergence holds true, in the future, cities will live at global centricity. At that time, they will see how and what they contribute to the value of the globe, because they are able to accomplish that without devaluing their region, and/or even adding value to their region. Until cities are able to do that, they are likely not able to add net value to the world.

LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION

Just as honeybees adapt themselves to different geographies, human settlements must adapt different solutions to the same infrastructure problems. Each location provides a unique combination of matter, energy and information in its resources. Over time humans have discovered and developed different technological solutions for city infrastructure that are appropriate for each distinctive environment. This has required ingenuity and experimentation. For example, building materials tend to be indigenous to their location; often what has worked or was available in one location either won’t work or is not available in another.

Many times in history this has been a costly learning. A modern example illustrates the problem well. On the West Coast of North America in the Sunbelt of California, a characteristic flat roof and deck construction was developed. Two thousand kilometers north, this building design was copied and built into apartments and condominiums in the temperate rainfore...