Living Cities Manifesto

LCE’s Manifesto embraces and honours the universal values of All Life @

*PPPP= Person, People, Places, Planet

In Gratitude we Celebrate the Master Code of Care as we fulfil our Commitments:

to protect our individual needs for physical and spiritual safety and survival; and prevent harm to all individuals so that we may serve all of *PPPP.
to honour the traditions and heritage of the elders and each group of persons so long as they do not threaten the health of *PPPP.
to defend the freedom of each individual to express their agency, development and creativity without infringing on the freedom of others to express their agency, development and creativity so that we may serve all of *PPPP.
to respect the value of order without imposing restrictions that harm individuals or groups; and honour the need for order that serves the entire system of *PPPP.
to promote the success of persons; to publicly recognize the origination/originator of ideas, products and services; to be accountable for the integral and fair exchange of products, services and ideas as long as resources do not accumulate for the benefit of a few interests, organizations and/or levels of development, at the expense of (or while depriving resources to) *PPPP.
to accept the dignity of groups; to ensure fair opportunity for all persons to pursue happiness as long as no individual or group is prevented from doing likewise; to not discriminate on the basis of race, sex, gender, creed and not to favour any group at the expense of another group as long as such action ensures the health of *PPPP.
to facilitate the integral flex and flow of energy across all aspects of the Gaia’s ecosystems; to unblock the barriers to the emergence of new ways of thinking, doing, being as long as they respect the health of all life; to mesh the elegance of natural patterns, processes and structures across *PPPP.
to value the geo/bio/noetic capacities of the planet; to respect the integral ecology of *PPPP; to co-emerge the evolutionary intelligence of Life inherent in *PPPP.

Principles Enact the Manifesto

Our LCE Manifesto is enabled by enacting these Principles that heal, restore and govern living cities.

1. Practise the Master Code of Care (MCC) to expand our circles of compassion. (Hamilton)

A fundamental place to start is with the MCC because it provides an ethic for Peace, a theory of change and a practice to calm the inflamed and damaged systems.

2. Nurture Human Security as Ecology for Peace. (Hamilton, Buhaug O’Brien et al)

Recognizing that safety and security is a human right that is fundamental to every stage of development and manifestation of human habitats will depend on the MCC – but must be held by trusted others who have not been party to the conflict (on either side). Safety and security must start small with individuals and families and embrace the city block by block. This can be tied into the next step of creating a Peace and Conflict Restoration process (e.g. Truth and Reconciliation commission).

3. Manage Peace and Conflict with the 4 Voices as Community, acting as a 3rd Side able to engage any issue and heal trauma, pain, injustice, conflict, pollution, degradation. (Ury, Huebl)
In this stage, the 4 Voices of Community (Citizens, Civic Managers, Business/Innovators, 3rd Sector) must be found and strengthened so that they can have the courage to engage issues, damages, and injuries in any of the 4 areas of reality (bio, psycho, cultural, systems). They will likely need strong representatives from other cities who can come in and incubate assemblies for Recovery (and reconciliation).

4. Recognize cities as complex adaptive living systems with 5 sets of intelligences for surviving, adapting to our environments and regenerating. (Hamilton, Capra)
Cities must be honoured as living systems who have intelligences at all scales from individual to collective to organizations, neighbourhoods, communities and are embedded in bioregions. They need to use the contexting and strategic intelligences guided by the evolution impulse of the Master Code of Care.

5. Learn Biomimicry lessons that reveal our cities are human hives – powerful resilient
collectives, like the beehive is for bees. (Hamilton, Bloom, Benyus)
When we look at regenerating cities as human hives, we will consider not only the rehabilitation of bricks and mortar but the lives of individuals, relationships and purposes and values embedded at every scale of the city. Looking at how Nature can recover from natural disasters can give us inspiration and impetus to learn how best to be effective in our recovery efforts.

6. Co-exist with 4 realities that inspire our lives through: intentions, cultures, behaviors, systems. (Wilber, Hamilton)
We can use these 4 realities to look for early wins to build capacities for recovery. This will include individual cities and the people and organizations from the rest of the world – always keeping in mind to embrace the 4 realities as co-arising, co-existing dimensions enables us to be most impactful (and should be based on the strata of Needs).

7. Empower 4 ways of knowing through multiple perspectives: subjective, intersubjective, objective, interobjective. (Wilber)
We can empower people’s recovery by using 4 approaches/epistemologies/strategic designs that embrace all our senses, intelligences, response-abilities in the 4 Quadrants. We bring in specialists for 4 Quadrants and work as recovery teams – co-operating and co-laborating with locals.

8. Serve the Purpose of Peace with the 4 Voices in our human hives (like the 4 roles in the beehive: Citizens/Producers, Business-Innovators/Diversity Generators, Resource Allocators/Civic Managers, Inner Judges/3rd Sector). (Hamilton)

We make room for the activities of all 4 Voices to serve Peace as we rebuild capacities. We keep Peace as an integrating/uniting Purpose in service to Planet/Place/People/Person.

9. Mature species development beyond the stage of competition into the stages of cooperation and collaboration – in other words Peace. (Sahtouris).
We help the city systems discover what resources they can contribute, how their needs are being met – and create the life conditions for recovery to emerge. We need to meet them where they are at and help them regrow full, healthy capacities for living (surviving, connecting with the environment and regenerating).

10. Grow our Cities through steps and stages that scale the Capacity for Peace. (Eddy, Hamilton)
We are mindful of Gaia’s stratified elements/capacities (Hamilton 2018) and design Journey for Peace to respect and recover how life depends on life in an ecosystem of Peace. We help the city design its own steps and stages and link individual cities to others in their bioregion so they can help each other.

Impact Overview of the LCE Manifesto

LCE frames its manifesto within the Unitive Narrative.

We align Living cities with Unitive Narrative as places where people are deeply happy, healthy and live longer in harmony with Nature.

LCE fosters the emergence of a living ecosystem of cities — a rhizomic meshwork that augments our capacity to human well on this living Earth.

We focus on the life-affirming, future- creating, and opportunity-increasing ways to Interbe, with each other and with all of life.

We imagine, explore, and manifest what we can give rise to, nurture and curate, together through the empowerment of Interbeing. None of us is as smart as all of us.

LCE’s vision nurtures our relationships, creates an organizational culture and develops organizational structure and processes that support our activities in a life-supporting way - where we could be our best and feel fully alive while also contributing to integral development of 10.000 cities, 7+ billions of human beings, wellbeing of non-human life and ONE living planet.

LCE emerges from the Unitive paradigm governance (education, health, justice, etc.) aligned as 4 levels of care (person, people, place, planet) in symbiotic service to the evolutionary wellbeing of all of Gaia’s life.

LCE co-creates service with the intelligences of Nature expressed unto the 7th Generation (100 years). We sense (through a collective field of consciousness) that LCE can integrate leaders and institutions worldwide in a global initiative that serves future generations (unto the 7th).

LCE co-designs, cooperatively and collaboratively with all city-makers, city-carers who offer maps, processes, toolkits aligned with this Unitive Narrative.

We facilitate and AQtivate an Overview Effect for all the energies and strategies regenerating Aliveness in cities and ecoregions.