Integral Cities & Bioregional Regeneration
reGeneration Rising: Conversations about regenerative practice (Episode 3)
On January 6th of 2020, I spoke to Marilyn Hamilton, author of the Integral City trilogy and a internationally respected elder of the integral community. I had known of Marilyn’s work for many years and finally got to meet her in the autumn of 2018 when I attended a gathering at the Findhorn ecovillage. Marilyn moved there a couple of years ago and now works closely with Findhorn College, which I co-directed between 2007 and 2010 while I lived in the ecovillage.
Marilyn and I had a fascinating conversation exploring mainly her work but also touching in on possible similarities and overlap between the theoretcical frameworks and participatory approaches we both draw on in our work.
At the outset, I invited Marilyn to talk about how she started working with cities as her primarly focus and how she has come to see cities as a fractal pattern of the human story and human system in general.
Consciousness and culture are crucial dimensions of a city beyond the physical infrastructure. Her integral approach to cities is inspired by Ken Wilber and the wider integral community. The integral lense and her own professional background lead Marilyn to understand cities as living evolutionary systems rather than only taking an infrastructural focus like so many planners do.
We explored scale-linking design as a way to work with the fractal of the human story that Marilyn speaks about. I briefly explained how in my 2006 PhD research on ‘Design for Human and Planetary Health’ I had used the concept of ‘metadesign’ as a way to focus attention on the upstream end of the design process — how our worldviews and value systems influence what we design and how the designs we create and implement in turn influence the way we see the world and what we value.
Marilyn speaks about the multiple intelligences of a city: Ecosphere, Emergent, Integral, Living, Individual Inner, Indivdiual Outer, Collective Social, Collective Cultural, Strategic Inquiry, Strategic Meshworking, Strategic Navigating, and Evolutionary.
Her professional approach is based on working with cities trough working with the people who live in them, letting them explore the story of their place together.
Marilyn works with a framework that she calls the ‘four voices of a city’: the citizens, the civic managers, the business innovators, and the ‘third sector’/civil society. She tries to learn more about a given place by working with groups that include representatives of all these four voices.
Often she simply starts by asking them to explore simple questions like: What is working around here? What is not working around here? What do you imagine when you think about the future of this place?, and Could you describe a story that connects you emotionally to this city? For those of you who know my work it will be easy to understand my resonance with this approach of creating regenerative cultures together through living the questions together.
Marilyn shared about her way of working with cities through telling the story of a particular city she worked with in Oklahoma in some detail.
We talked about the links between the integral community and the growing community of regenerative practitioners — trained by Regenesis Group and also Carol Sanford.
We took a deeper look at contextualising the city within the its ‘ecoregion’ or ‘bioregion’. Mentioned the pioneering work on Patrick Geddes and how he tried to work with education, culture creation, civic participation in his holistic approach to cities and regions. …
Other topics we touch on:
- The potential for transformation that lies in the deepening crisis.
- ‘A species level rite of passage’
- Interbeing
- Understanding the balance between competition and collaboration in life’s evolutionary journey
- Life as a planetary process becoming conscious of itself
- Accepting diversity of opinions, worldviews and perspectives while finding the ability of co-creatively move forward together
- Working with people where they are at rather than where you might want them to be (in their own developmental journey)
- the role of inter-generational exchange
- ecologies of cultures in cities
- Marilyn’s passion for bees and her metaphor of the city as ‘the human hive’
- The ‘master code’ of working for the benefit of planet, place and the capacity of communities and individuals to unfold their potential
- my contribution to the Urban Hub book that Marilyn has invited me to offer a chapter for
- … some of the project Marilyn is involved in with regard to the upcoming Integral Europe conference …
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Daniel Christian Wahl — Catalyzing transformative innovation in the face of converging crises, advising on regenerative whole systems design, regenerative leadership, and education for regenerative development and bioregional regeneration.
Author of the internationally acclaimed book Designing Regenerative Cultures
