Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive
Product Type: Book
Product Price: $27.95
Manufacturer: New Society Publishers
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Description
Evolving city intelligences mesh, multiply and integrate all city capacities. This book makes courageous placemaking connections, opens up new relationship pathways, brings hope for solving intractable problems and shows how cities are learning. Integral City takes an evolutionary perspective for city resilience.
Chapters explore:
• 4 meta-maps for city wholeness
• Bio-psycho-cultural-social intelligences for city change
• 12 appreciative inquiries for evolutionary direction
• Meshworking strategies for city learning
• Integral Vital Signs Monitors for city wellbeing
• 12 sets of simple rules for complex adaptiveness
Integral City will appeal to anyone interested in creating conditions in which our cities can evolve intelligently beyond the challenges of the 21st century.
Dr. Marilyn Hamilton is a “meshworker” and founder of Integral City, creating conditions for the evolution of healthy ecologies in people systems. She has over twenty-five years of international experience catalyzing urban community and organizational change and has written numerous books.
Reviews
Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2009-08-13
Summary: "A Must Read"
This is a fantastic book... the author has created an 'authentic' view of the city as a holistic space worthy of our respect as a complex and evolving hive. I have not found a more complete and integrative work on the complex relationship humanity has with the city, the community and its institutions.
As a graduate student in Public Administration, this book has shaped and developed my own perspective of community and the next steps that the field of administration must take.
The book offers solutions for the modern administrator from an integral perspective, many of which I am currently using in my own administrative role in the multi-agency environment.
I recommend this book to anyone who is involved with their community and to those 'integralists' out there who will undoubtedly enjoy this application of integral theory to a subject that we are all intimately familiar with.
Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2009-08-12
Summary: "Changed my unconscious assumptions about cities."
I read this book as a volunteer activist interested in community engagement and the dialogical processes. I was expecting to gain insight into the social dynamics of city life as it relates to growth, change, development and problem solving. These expectations were met and exceeded resulting in a personal change of consciousness. I will never again see cities in the same light, or with the same innocence. The analogy of the city as a bee-hive used throughout the book has altered my understanding of the physical, social and spatial nature of cities. On a personal level it has challenged my unconscious assumptions about what entails a healthy, livable city and how personal behavior contributes to collective health.
For those who like charts, diagrams and systematic ways of processing information, this book is full of goodies. I would highly recommend it for city planners, environmentalists, policy makers, social activists and everyday citizens such as myself.