Resources

This is a first version of the Resources pages.

Coming shortly are the Pathways. At present each pathway has a limited space in the Deeper City book. Here the detail can now be filled out, structured, formatted, linked to many sources and ongoing activities.

This will be a unique resource, based on the book Deeper City, where each of 44 pathways goes online. This will enable flexible detail, multi-layer mapping, ongoing visual blogs (vlogs). Most interesting it will include forums and comment threads, so that each pathway builds up as a resource for its community. Finance, urban design, agriculture, and health services are some of the most topical pathways which all deserve open and forward looking debate.

First, here is the basic text with supporting references.

The book: Deeper City– synergistic pathways from smart to wise

On a small fragile planet, with climate change and expanding cities and social turbulence, in a complex inter-connected world, old solutions don’t seem to work. We need a rethink on 

how to organize our cities and economies and societies. There’s an urgent call for a next-generation operating system or social contract.

This book starts on that journey, with new ways of mapping complex problems, with a Deeper City mind. The key is to grow the collective intelligence – the ‘cognitive capital’ of human systems, economic or social or political. One kind of collective intelligence is a jungle, a ‘smart’ city where the ‘winner-takes-all’. Another leads towards a civilization, a ‘wise’ city where ‘winners-are-all’. So how to get ‘from smart to wise’?

This book explores the potential of the Deeper City mind. It sets out the pathways ‘from smart to wise’. Each is a combination of ‘mode-III’ synergistic finance, technology, eco-innovation, social enterprise and so on. The result is a visionary and practical resource library, with 44 synergistic mappings, each based on a ‘mode-III’ collective intelligence. The book is published by Routledge in 2020.

The background is available on-line and you can download the Deeper City flyer.

Pathway mappings

These 40 pathway mappings are the result of asking some challenging questions.

• what if we organize societies, economies, politics etc, around a ‘wiser’ collective intelligence?
• which pathways could lead in that direction?

To answer this, we need ways to move from ‘problems’ and syndromes (generally Mode-I or II, evolutionary and ‘smart’) – to ‘solutions’ and synergies (generally in Mode-III, co-evolutionary and ‘wise’). So for each sector or field, we explore by mapping and design, the ‘synergistic pathways from smart to wise’. If we know where we are going and how to travel, we could use a ‘road-map’. But if goals are fuzzy, the routes are many, and uncertainties are all around, we need something more flexible and creative, more like a pathway. And if the pathway depends on synergistic thinking, which can transform from a smart to a wise system, then we talk about a ‘synergistic pathway from smart to wise’. Such pathways adapt and emerge as they go along, combining technical left-brain with holistic right-brain thinking. Here each full-page Pathway Mapping aims to show this graphically. The general format shows syndromes (problems) on the left, and synergies (ways forward) on the right. This is a flexible format with many variations.