Technology has been transforming our world for thousands of years. Scientific and technological revolutions have shaped the course of history. However, the pace of change today is accelerating dramatically. We have entered into an era of ‘hyper-change…on a global scale and at a speed with no precedent in human history’. Technological progress has become so rapid that it is outpacing our ability to deliberate and act prudently. Our legal system and ethicists cannot keep up new technologies. It is unclear what the world will be like at the end of this century and beyond. We are on the verge of…

The world is undergoing the largest wave of urban growth in history, bringing huge social, economic and environmental transformations. Urbanization has the potential to usher in a new era of well-being, resource efficiency and economic growth. But cities are also home to high concentrations of poverty. Nowhere is the rise of inequality clearer than in urban areas, where wealthy communities coexist alongside, and separate from, slums and informal settlements. The face of inequality is increasingly even in our Western cities. Too many urban residents grapple with extreme poverty, exclusion, vulnerability and marginalization.

Within urban transitions there is far more fluidity in relationships where the knowledge is flowing within, across and between organizations, people, economics. The boundaries are blurring, that increasing fuzziness needs shifting our style of decision-making and solution finding. Urban development closely resembles the recent past, relying on existing models to determine appropriate actions and investments is rational. Struggling with the dominant linear logic constrains innovation, restricts to provide radically different urban transition and limits our abilities to change fast enough. Creating that nagging feeling of relentless destruction or disturbance, the very opposite of the stable equilibrium of the past. Cities that…

Cities at all stages of development are exposed to increasing economic and environmental pressures and instabilities associated with globalization, urbanization, biophysical limits and ecological boundaries and resource depletion. Cities will need to plan and manage  for enduring supply of services in dynamic urban systems affected by global changes. These hazards are often difficult to anticipate and may interact in ways that amplify their consequences. The global financial crisis has in many places ushered in a period of austerity, heightening the risks of adversity for urban citizens and governments, making it difficult for them to cope with these kinds of unexpected…

The world is urbanizing at a breakneck pace, this urban revolution is mesmerizing. But all cities are becoming more instable and fragile. The intensity of their fragility, however, varies considerably across time and space. Some cities are affected by acute fragility and are close to collapse. Others are also at risk, albeit to a lesser degree. Even our modern cities like Amsterdam, London, New York, Paris, and Tokyo are not immune. In the decades to come, the city, not the state, will decide stability and development. People around the world have been converging on cities for centuries, and more than half of…

Urban complexity implies multiple dimensions of interactions over a vast range of phenomena governed for example by economic, physical, ecological and environmental aspects and political, health and educational systems. And of social aspects, cognitive and ethical intelligence like social economic status, equality, demographics, psychological and cognitive factors such as ideology, sexual identity. Ethical intelligence defined as the structural logic to survive, earn value, add value, acquire and manage knowledge and deal with the nature of reality.

Confronted with mounting social, economic, and ecological crises, growing numbers of people have begun to realize that traditional strategies and reformist approaches no longer work. Simply put, many understand that addressing the problems of the twenty-first century requires going beyond business as usual. It requires ‘changing the system.’ But what does this mean? And what would it entail?

At the core of the challenge we face is the inevitable uncertainty of dynamic combination human-natural systems. Rapid modifications of biophysical systems have the potential to trigger regime shifts —abrupt and irreversible changes—that will have significant consequences. It is clear that the likelihood of regime shifts is higher in ecosystems where humans have reduced resilience by modifying biogeochemical cycles, altering hydrological regimes, reducing biodiversity, and changing the magnitude, frequency, and duration of disturbance regimes. We know these are hard problems to solve, but they are by no means impossible. The understanding of complex systems is growing, evolving and is ripe…

Wake up, we are in the Anthropocene. Our civilization has never faced such existential risks as those associated with global warming, biodiversity erosion and resource depletion. There is no doubt humans have been successful in modifying the planet to meet the demands of a rapidly growing population. But the gains achieved by this spectacular re-engineering have come at a price. It is now wide apparent and acknowledged that humanity’s use of the biosphere, is not sustainable. On the other hand we never had such an opportunity to advance prosperity and eradicate poverty. We have the choice to either finally embark…

Any time we talk about a funding strategy, or a financial model, this is really code language for embedding ourselves in a credit system. Money today is credit. All of our conventional sources of funding, whether dollars or euros or yen, come into existence through a giant credit facility otherwise known as the banking system. This is now a single, globally integrated, globally homogenous system. We tend to think of banks as the power, the engines of money, but they’re not. Money’s circulation is powered by our acceptance of it in the payment of goods and services, and this is…