VIEWS > NEST CITY BOOK
What’s Nest City?
In Nest City, Beth Sanders argues that our linear ways of thinking about, organizing and planning our cities do not meet the true nature of cities as complex and messy systems. There are no simple solutions to the challenges we face: many citizens don’t feel they belong; we don’t agree on how to best move around; many don’t have jobs, or homes they can afford; we make running businesses challenging; we are facing challenges with the climate crisis. At a time when understanding the relationship between our physical, economic and social habitats is essential, Sanders sets forth an approach to work with the disruptions of our times.
Drawing on her experience as a city planner and a relationship-broker in the conflicts that surface in city life, Sanders offers several strategies to explore how citizens, public institutions, community organizations and the business community can work together to improve our cities. She explores the evolutionary nature of our relationship with cities, and how the tension we experience in city life compels each of us to work to improve our cities. Our work is what regenerates our cities. The city habitats we make for ourselves are as good as we choose to make them. If they’re not good enough, it’s up to us to improve them.
The result is a book that articulates the importance of having a sense of direction, being willing as citizens and cities to learn along the way, and accepting the uncertainty and messiness of cities as opportunities to improve them — so they serve citizens well. Nest City will forever alter the way you look at your city, your local public institutions and community organizations and business — and how you think about and contribute to your city.
Nest City is for you if…
You want better relationships to advance needed improvements in your city
You want ideas to examine complex challenges and discern practical action
You are a citizen looking for practical ways to activate the improvements you see are needed in your city
You are a professional looking for ways to weave together conflicting perspectives about your city so your work gets better results
You run a business looking for ways to better work with other perspectives in your city so the contributions you want to make become a reality
You work or volunteer at a community organization looking ways to advance your work
You want to better hear others
You want to be heard
What’s in the book?
Introduction
The Introduction introduces the “nest” metaphor and the unspoken role humans have in creating our nest: the city. The big question: What does it mean to consciously be in relationship with our cities?
Part One
Part One — City Habitat Flight Path argues that cities build human evolutionary capacity. Foundational ‘impulse’ patterns are introduced to explain why cities exist, how they are created and the underlying values that evolve as our cities grow and evolve.
Chapter 1—Cities are a Survival Skill presents cities as the result of a deep human impulse to survive and thrive. Building on Jane Jacobs’ premise that new work creates cities, Nest City describes the city impulse as our economic life nested within our social and physical contexts.
Chapter 2 — The City Habitat is a Collective Endeavour describes the city as a place of collective learning. Three city habitats (economic life, social habitat, physical habitat) are explored as a means to examine how we can organize for adaptability. The question: How would we organize ourselves in cities if we purposefully set out to create cities that learn and grow along with us?
Chapter 3 — Cities are Evolutionary Systems lays out the evolutionary relationship we have with cities: they are built by citizens, so as we grow and evolve as citizens, our city habitat grows and evolves with us.
Chapter 4 — Planning is Work that Serves the City identifies how the process of planning cities must shift from simple linear, mechanical processes to complex processes and practices that support citizens’ efforts to notice, adjust and organize for cities that serve citizens well.
Part Two
Part Two — Nesting Materials explores the first level of city nestworks, organizing patterns as we generate and regenerate cities: destination, journey and emergence.
Chapter 5 — Destination: We are Alive and Adrift argues that cities and citizens work toward short-term destinations, for which we make linear plans, and a more general, even vague, sense of direction. A sense of direction involves higher-order purposes around which we organize — and this feels messy and uncertain.
Chapter 6 — Journey: Messy and Uneasy explores how much of the uncertainty we experience in cities requires that we learn to create social habitats that invite exploration of conflict and uncertainty. A social habitat that can tolerate uneasiness helps cities move in the direction they wish to move.
Chapter 7 — Emergence: Thresholds of (Un)known Possibility notices how we never build the city — or life — we think we will. We focus on a destination, we learn along the way, and the choices we make reshape our world. New ways of organizing, that allow us to step into the unknown, allow us to see, grow and perform new possibilities — and regenerate our cities.
Part Three
Part Three — Activating City Nestworks explores the relationships between destination, learning journey, and emergence as we organize our city habitats.
Chapter 8 — We Are City Makers describes how when we choose work that is full of passion and joy (when our basic needs are met), we enter explicitly into a relationship with our cities that allows us to create cities and welcome how they recreate us. Choosing our destinations, and learning along the way, is how we make our cities.
Chapter 9 — We Are Evolutionary Agents for the City illuminates how when we choose to embark on learning journeys with the unknown that emerges around us, we deepen our civic practices as citizens, more fully engaging in the dance of the city. This relationship involves a higher level of listening to self, others and our city, which means embracing vocation as conscious citizenship.
Chapter 10 — We Ride the Winds of City Emergence describes how the city emerges from the questions we ask. When we organize feedback loops between our economic life and our social and physical habitats we test our destinations. As past civilizations have fallen, so may ours unless we choose to create the conditions to thrive in a messy, non-linear, complex world.
A Bird's Eye View
A Bird’s Eye View concludes Nest City with a reminder of the nests of reciprocity that are the patterns of city making. Do the never-ending work to make yourself at home in your city and make room for others to make themselves at home.
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