Integral City sat down in June, 2017, with Lev Gordon on his recent visit to North America. We got the “inside scoop” from Lev on how he and his colleagues had transformed the Urbanfest 2014, featuring Integral City with other urban experts, into a Living Cities Association that stretches from Vladivostok to St. Petersburg. Read our interview with Lev Gordon and catch his enthusiasm for Life!!

(In the photo below Lev is in the Top Row, First Column.)

IC: What activities does Living Cities undertake?

LG: The national community of practice “Living Cities” spontaneously emerged in Russia around 2014 based among other things on the Integral City approach. Today it includes some 1000 participants from over 75 cities who participated in annual Forums of Living Cities and other related events and who share the ideas and ideals on an holistic, integral approach to city development.

The community involves both experts and practitioners of city development activities from all 4 Voices of the city. The mission that lies at the core of everything we do is “1000 Living cities by 2035”. This really means affecting and transforming all 4 quadrants in each of those cities (there are about 1108 cities in Russia overall) through education, nation-wide and city-wide dialogue and research, generating and sharing best practices, building stronger communication and cooperation within each city and in-between cities and communities. In addition we intend that development will happen through stimulating cooperation between the 4 Voices,  leadership development, as well as through a constant inner evolution process of each and every participant.

We increasingly emphasize this point – a conscious inner personal evolution is the crucial enabling condition of the subsequent changes on a community level. Where does it start? From inner realization of the creative force that goes through each one of us and through accepting a responsible, mature outlook on life that happens around and through us. This is the first step toward personal and city awakening. We bring more Life, Light, Consciousness and Interconnectedness to the cities. More healing and integration.

IC: Where does Living Cities operate?

LG: Today activities span the wide geography from Vladivostok in the Far East to Saint Petersburg in the West of Russia. Off-line and online. In small groups and during nation-wide gatherings that bring together hundreds of active smart people. Clearly, Moscow is the central hub, as many experts live there and it is logistically the easiest point to get together, but also other cities participate – including Saint Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Izhevsk, Samara and so on.

In addition to physical gathering of the projects in the cities, we also see that our ideas and approaches get noticed and become operational through existing nation-wide projects. In particular, last year the Government of Russia launched a national priority project : “Creating comfortable urban environment”. They visualize that over the next 5 year period it will affect 11,000 cities, small towns and villages. Living Cities experts form more than half of the project’s Expert Council and we include the ideas of a holistic approach to city development – including both physical infrastructure and management systems, communications and communities, technologies and culture and so on – these ideas and practices are now finding their way into the project’s methodologies, educational curriculum and related legislation.

At this very moment candidates from across the country participate in the first national elections to the Board of Living Cities initiative. Overall, the level of activity and complexity of initiatives and projects is rising and so will increasingly the geography of the network of Living Cities. In 2017-2018 we plan to connect to the Creative Cities network run by the UN, European City Embassies network and other initiatives from around the globe. Online we are present at www.livingcities.ru

IC: Who is involved as service designers/deliverers?

LG: Many leading national and international experts are part of the initiative. Marilyn Hamilton, Cees Donkers, Pavel Luksha, Alexei Baturin, Sergei Samartsev, Tatyana Bochkareva, Valeria Terentieva, Sergei Zhuravlev, Arcady Chernov, Yuri Aistov, Andrei Sharonov, Sofia Trotsenko, Andrei Asadov and others – names well known both within and outside of Russia. Experts share the creative and delivery stages with people from business, government and academia – creating a synthetic approach that includes both the mind and the heart, the body, the soul and the spirit – all brought together in a natural way.

IC: How do you involve the 4 Voices?

LG: Increasingly, key projects and events are designed with the 4 Voices in mind. Wherever possible we see representatives of all voices being part of the core team.

IC: Tell me about the mayor(s) who took your courses.

LG: Over the last couple of years we saw an interesting trend – people who come to Living Cities events within a year grow from a community-minded local business person or from a senior local government official to a city mayor – we have such examples in cities with populations from 100 thousands people to 1 million. The energy, inner maturity and spirit of authentic leadership and service to the society seem to be the pillars of this transition.

IC: What value did they get from the courses?

LG: They received inspiration, broader and deeper and more integral vision, including a vision of the 4 Voices as catalysts of positive change, as well as belief in human potential and readiness to act on this set of beliefs and values. The learned how to unlock this creative potential through specific practices and tools that are developed within the Living Cities platform.

IC: Who else is taking the courses?

LG: Really everyone – from young students to mayors and vice-mayors, from regional development corporation leaders to entrepreneurs, from personal development specialists to mass-media owners – everyone who sees cities as laboratories for cooperation and exchange where the future of local communities, the country and the world is being born.

IC: What are your plans for the future?

 LG: While we have a grand vision – basically creating the conditions for the next wave of human civilization to come through conscious, integral, divine cities – we also are very practical in making specific steps to gradually move towards this vision. In 2017-2018 we plan to form a robust and agile governance system for the Living Cities, building on effective teamwork – also through experimenting with teal and turquoise approaches to organization, double the number of cities in the network, form several strategic partnerships, organize the IV Forum of Living Cities, create a strong Supervisory Board, build several sources of funding, increase multifold our internet and media presence and start international cooperation projects. Emir Custurica, a world-famous movie director, founder of Kustendorf village in Serbia and a guest of last year’s Forum in Saint Petersburg invited us to hold a European Forum of Living Cities and we aspire to do it in 2018.

Yet, above all, we plan to live every day fully awake, with joy, sense of purpose, grateful for all the beautiful ways that Life chooses to creatively express Itself. We simply Follow the Energy. A country and the planet of Living Cities? Why not.

Click here to view Living Cities in action.

Professor of Cities, Richard Florida has reconsidered the consequences of cities pursuing the creative class as a desirable strategy for their success (subject of his book The Rise of the Creative Class). In his new book The New Urban Crisis: How our Cities are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class – And What We Can Do About It, Florida faces some of the unintended consequences of what I would call a “mono-culture” approach to city design (also seemingly attractive to Elon Musk and his neo-city ideas and China with their empty ghost cities).

After exploring the data, he has collected on the many ways he observes multiple types of segregation impacting US cities (including extreme competition, elites, gentrification, inequalities, suburban malaise), Florida arrives at Chapter 10 where he proposes 7 pillars for creating conditions for “urbanism for all” (primarily in the USA).

Briefly the strategies are as follows:

1. Make clustering support city wellbeing by changing the way we tax high value inner city land. Florida proposes we change from a property tax to a land (taxing what is built on the land) to a land value tax. He (and several key economists) contend this would recognize the scarcity of land and produce revenues that would strengthen city economy through shifting building to where it is needed and increase density that could be aligned with the pedestrian scale (a Jane Jacobs guideline).
2. Invest in infrastructure that promotes density and growth, particularly through mass transit. Florida, to his credit, in recognizes that not all cities are created equal. A one size fits all approach will not work for all cities. In this pillar, he considers that cities with populations less than 5-6 million people can still work for car-based transportation systems. Exceeding this threshold, he argues that mass transit is critically necessary to gain effective mobility. Florida considers the value of mass transit particularly in the megalopolis zones (like NYC, Boston, Washington DC) to connect one city to another and allow for density and clustering as envisaged in Pillar 1.
3. Most US cities are in desperate need of more rental housing – it should be built. This seems to be a direct consequence of US tax incentives that allow homeowners to deduct mortgage interest from their taxes. This was policy was purposefully implemented post WWII and re-enforced post 2008 financial crisis, in order to encourage home ownership in the suburbs. This policy has reinforced the American dream to own a house, but it has also encouraged massive urban sprawl, where cities originally emptied from the core to the suburbs (creating racial segregation in the bargain) and required infrastructure to support progressively distant housing developments. To encourage the building of rental housing that would offer new less expensive options to the middle class, Florida dares to suggest supplying housing vouchers to middle class citizens along with a basic income via negative income tax. He contends such changes in expenditure flow would encourage the badly needed investment to build rental housing.
4. Having opened the genie of economic restructuring, Florida’s 4^th Pillar considers the conversion of low-wage service jobs into middle class work that pays wages capable of supporting families. He likens the economic recalibration of family-supporting wages to the conversion of low-paid factory work to blue collar jobs that could support a middle-class family. Florida quotes Henry Ford’s wisdom on this insight “that assembly-line workers should be paid enough to buy the cars they were making”. In modern America, what would be the equivalent insight? “Walmart cashiers should be paid enough to house, clothe, feed and maintain their households?” Florida points to progressive retail and hospitality companies that have developed “good jobs strategies” – like Whole Foods, Zara, Costco, Trader Joes, Four Seasons. He contends that corporate America has the power to make this change and reap the benefits of increased productivity and profitability into the bargain. Again, to his credit, Florida discusses a minimum wage, that recognizes the geographic differences in suggests that would need to be considered so that minimum wages would not be one size fits all – but vary by the cost of living conditions from city to city.

5. Florida wades into the tackling of poverty with a deeper discussion of the negative income tax – but he ties it directly to a need for America to address its flagrant inequality of access to excellent schooling. He points to American’s reliance on property taxes to fund schooling as a strategy that perpetuates the cycle of poverty across many generations, and condemns students living in poor economic areas (aka low property tax zones) from gaining the schooling they need to get better paying jobs. Florida advocates for early childhood education (that is also caught in this death spiral) to be available for all children. He returns to the negative income tax and cautions those Americans who worry that it discourages active work, by suggesting it would decline as incomes would rise. (He cites economists from both conservative views like Milton Friedman and liberal views like James Tobin who supported the negative income tax.)
6. Florida steps out of the American-centric strategies to propose that American should lead a global effort for more resilient cities in parts of the world where urbanization is progressing. He points out (as we have done in 2013 when we considered cities to be both Tipping Points and Trigger Points in their nations stability and economic success). In fact, Florida suggests that the US would be more effective at city-building than nation-building!!
7. Florida’s final pillar relates to the redistribution of power from nation and state to city and community. He argues that tax dollars and decision-making powers need to be recalibrated so cities have the power to design new tax strategies, build needed infrastructure and gain a seat at the decision-making table. He points to Britain’s pursuit of a “Senate of Cities”, Australia’s creation of a federal “ministry of cities” and Canada’s strategy for affordable housing as examples of how redistribution is happening elsewhere.

Florida concludes with a grand sweep across history that shows cities have always been the engines of “innovation, economic growth, diversity, tolerance and social progress.”

Integral City would suggest that in order for this to happen these 7 Pillars could be strengthened in these ways:

1. Beyond being city-centric or meta-city centric or even trans-nationally city-centric, cities need to consider their contribution to the wellbeing of Gaia. What would happen if we reframed our urban crises in terms of finding the wellbeing and direction in our cities for them to become Gaia’s Reflective Organ? How would raising our context for change shift our overview of impact and outcome?
2. While Florida has noted that the super cities he names have discovered planet-scale purposes (like trade for NYC and finance for London), it should be the job of all cities to discover their greater purpose in service to the planet. From there, they could develop a shared vision with the 4 Voices of the city and a strategy to implement it that would make effective use of city resources.
3. Florida (and some other urban thought leaders) has considered the psychology of the city (as in Who’s Your City?) and he demonstrates that he values schooling and early development for children. However, he appears to be uninformed about adult development and the implications this has for cities. So many of his arguments could be reframed and recalibrated if only he recognized that the great divides in cities are often (if not always) rooted in consciousness and culture. Only when we are able to act on those developmental patterns by finding the centre of (developmental) gravity that influences worldview, relationships, values and decision making, will we have the means to implement Florida’s ideas for change.
4. Because Florida does not offer a planet-centric overview to context the life of cities, he is lacking the power of the Master Code (Taking Care of Self, Others, Place, Planet). Therefore, Florida’s strategies also lack the energy of Placecaring that is a prerequisite to the kind of Placemaking that he envisages.
5. Florida’s depth and breadth of data and proposals for change suggest a plurality of approaches to city change. For the most part, they are rooted in the right-hand quadrants of the Integral City model (Map 1) – focused on Placemaking (in many healthy ways). But they largely lack the left-hand quadrants of Placecaring as noted in Item 4.
6. Florida’s plurality of Pillars cries out for a view of the city that is wholistic. An Integral City framework can provide that model – and with its 5 Maps, shapeshift around the qualities of living systems, complexity and Integral realities that help us to understand the dynamics of cities that enables them to survive longer than either nations or organizations (according to Geoffrey West). You can find the Integral City framework and impact designs in our 2 books here.

FULLY ALIVE

Short Story

by Marilyn Hamilton

Imagine you’re a passenger on a jet that mysteriously time warps to the year 2037: That’s what a team of world-class science-fiction writers did for “Seat 14C,” a project created by XPRIZE and Japan’s ANA airline.

I imagined a story – and although it didn’t win the prize I share it as a blog – to reflect in fiction some of the possibilities of an imagined future through the lenses of Integral City’s consciousness and culture.

This focus on inner technology is in contrast to those writers (more than two dozen contributors) who focused primarily on external technological visions for 2037.

“These writers offered a fascinating glimpse into what the future may hold in a number of areas: transportation, energy + environment, education, identity and privacy, housing, currency, jobs, and even relationships,” said Eric Desatnik, who wss the project’s creator and producer as well as senior director of public relations for the nonprofit XPRIZE organization.

The project is in line with XPRIZE’s focus on boosting technological innovation through incentives – including multimillion-dollar contests for private-sector spaceships, super-efficient automobiles and medical diagnostic devices inspired by the tricorders on “Star Trek.”

Visitors to the Seat14C.com website started their ride by watching a short video about the backstory: ANA Flight 008 is on its way from Tokyo to San Francisco when the Boeing 777 jet flies through a disturbance in spacetime.

It seems like just one moment for the passengers, but when the jet comes in for a landing, they discover that the date is actually June 28, 2037. They suddenly have to adjust to technologies that have advanced 20 years while they weren’t looking.

The screen turns into an interactive seating chart. Imagine  you call up a tale for Seat 14c as told by Integral City’s emissary — read on.

“You won’t believe what happened when our We-Space tapped into the Field of Evolutionary Intelligence twenty years ago!! And it’s all because of your Human Hive!”

Alpha gazed at Omega’s palpable excitement. She felt a little overcome – even dismayed not to mention disoriented. She had just arrived from SFO, expecting to report on her crazy tour, sharing the impact of her new paradigm for the city in Tokyo, Shanghai, Moscow and Findhorn (of all places).

From the start, it had seemed far-fetched that she should be the medium through which the Field would download the new operating system. And God knows she had argued with the Voice when it had demanded her attention, “Look at the City”. “Not me, I’m not a city planner –  I don’t do cities,” she had resisted. But persistently, gently but firmly the Command had repeated, “Look at the City”. If she really intended to live her vows of obedience and service to planetary wellbeing, she could not refuse and in the end relinquished control to the Source. That was all that was needed to open doors, discover maps, gain new eyes and even turn on the lights in Year 2000. She had released her whole being to the quest of manifesting the new operating system for the city which came to be known through her as Integral City or more colloquially the Human Hive.

Click here to Download the Full Story: Seat 14C _FULLY ALIVE – mh

Workshop Tarragona, Catalonya

20-21 November 2017

New leaderships for what and how

We live in times of accelerated change and increasing complexity that challenge us to develop new individual and collective abilities if we want to become real builders of a better future for a thriving, sustainable and harmonious world.

We are in a transition that urgently needs evolved leaderships based on new ways of being, thinking and acting together to realize all our potential.

The good news is that we can develop such leadership capacities if we learn:
 What are the principles and essential practices to lead complex systems?
 How can we develop the ability and wisdom to navigate in uncertain times?
 What is needed to activate the collective leadership of a community/org.?
 Which methodologies allow us to co-create together the future we want?
 How can we inspire and model change from our experience and example?

Who is it for?

This Workshop is aimed at all people who have, or want to have, evolved leadership roles in organizations and communities of all kinds: social, business, public, academic or third sector. It’s for those that want to make a difference.

Download Brochure with Details on Location and Registration here:

20-21 NOV Workshop Leadership (2)

Who are Our Guides?

You will be able to discover and experience the capabilities that the new leadership demands from Marilyn Hamilton (Canada) and George Pór (UK), top-level international experts on evolutionary change, renowned leadership, transformation of complex systems, evolved organizations and collective intelligence.
Marilyn and George, Hub Coevolució collaborators, will be accompanied by Gonzalo Miguez, member of the Hub’s core group, an expert in individual and collective learning environments.

Check out the full story at the website Hub-Coevolucio