The illusion of the individual is one of the driving forces that resist the sustainable and equitable development of our cities.

To think you are just you, draws boundaries too close to the person, which drives protectionist based decisions that propagate through society in endless waves

The tragic comedy of it all is, the you, you think you are, is not fundamentally you

There is no I in Mind.

Friedrich Nietzsche, the father of modern psychology, the first psychologist philosopher,and the influencer of Freud, Jung, and Adler, explained that our psyche contains within its depths, primitive drives that stretch back into the pre-history of humanity and animality. This “abundance of contrary drives and impulses” left us with a mind of multiplicity, an aggregation of intertwined psychological entities.

Conceptualizing the psyche, “as social structure of the drives and affects”, as a city in which numerous sub-personalities simultaneously live. He proposed we needed to allow the development of our “Organising Idea” that would act as a master drive or ruling passion that would help guide our lives.

The conclusion, our minds can be conceptualized as a city.

There is no I in Body.

Your body is right now, not just carrying, but completely dependant on more than a trillion different bacteria which are keeping the show on the road.

These residents are helping you digest food, produce vitamins and minerals, and stop disease by crowding out and killing infectious bacteria. Our microbes help to build our bodies and sculpt and renew our organs as we get older.

They even affect your mood, so with that, your decision-making process and the actualized results of life decisions.

Our bodies represent the built environment of a city.

There is no I in World.

With nearly 7.7 billion of us stretched across the planet, you are unable to claim that your actions in the world are insignificant and irrelevant to the whole.

Your actions and decisions are part of an accumulation of a global species, who have stretched the resources of the planet, decimated the environment, and driven up to 1 million species of plants and animals to extinction

Even the globalization of Earth is starting to look like a planetary city-state

There is no I in Universe

The Quantum Field Theory explains that the fundamental structure of the universe is made up of 17 fields. The excitation of these fields with enough energy produces quanta or parcel of energy, a sub-atomic particle on observation.

Three of these particles form the makeup of all atoms and the fourth creating light. These atoms are the building blocks of molecules and are the building blocks of all physical and biological matter in the universe including you.

On a fundamental level in the universe, we are all inescapably connected, with not just each other, but with everything.

So where is the I in City? Where do we draw the line of responsibility to our communities, to the growth and sustainable development of our society, our economy, our natural environment, and every biological sibling that lives with us?

Can we hide behind the drudgery of debate of whether we have the right captains for our ship? Or is it time for each of us to see the true power and potential of our part to play in the whole?

There is no conceivable way that you are on your own in this world, and when we all embrace that, our path and decision to work together to create a better future will be clear.