Until recently humans related to Nature as dominators of life entitled to control, manage, interbreed and command it. Human settlement generally focused on external bricks and mortar adapted to one of the world’s17 geographies. Our cities were defined by land-based boundaries, nations, states, zones and streets as dictated by dominator hierarchies.

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This paradigm was enshrined in city technologies, organizations, faith communities, interpersonal relationships and subjective self-sense. City systems were largely operated as cybernetic externally designed and managed systems. Such command and control patterns were embedded in education, healthcare, emergency response, justice and social care systems, as well as the infrastructures that supported city transportation/mobility, communication, finance, resource distribution, energy, water, waste and food management.

Regeneration sciences show that cities are impacting nine major Earth resources that constrain support for all life. New economic paradigms reveal the continuity of all life will depend on recalibrating the relationship between Earth constraints and human social justice factors.

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The sciences of social and living systems reveal that human mental and spiritual wellbeing determines the quality of life in cities - measured both in terms of “care” for life in all its biodiversity (at planet, places, people, persons) and experienced as deep happiness when such care resonates, coheres and emerges at multiple scales.

Cities must assume responsibility for their relationship to their bioregions and between cities sharing the same bioregion. This can redress the historical pollution and depletion of city-adjacent bioregions and create regenerative city eco-footprints. Bio-region regeneration can reduce the developed-world city use of resources requiring 3-5 planets to the developing-world city use of 1 planet or less.

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The combination of city-making capacities of objective/actions, interobjective systems and city-caring capacities of subjective beliefs/responses and intersubjective cultures/relationships, creates an integral paradigm that reframes the city dominator hierarchy into a living, organic, complex, wholistic view of the city in regenerative relationship with its bioregion.

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Such a tetra-integrated paradigm reveals cities have multiple intelligences energised by an evolutionary impulse at their core – like a kind of GPS – with nested developmental lifecycles that recalibrate city human and non-human relationships with their bioregion(s).

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Planetary scientists consider Earth/Gaia is a living system that has evolved all life on the planet – including humans – potentially as Gaia’s Reflective Organs as cities, with organisations as organelles and individuals as cells.

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When contexted and underpinned by the cosmology of a Unitive Narrative this integral view of cities maps the fractal, holographic nature of human systems from the individual to the family/group/organisation, to the city to the planet. Thus, both the agency of individuals and the influence of collectives create a unifying field effect - the relationship between ME/WE/All (including WE mapped as multiple nested interconnected organisations).