Jamie Wheal, Tony Cho, Sylvia Benito & Alexandra Tohme at AUREA: The Party Was the Portal

Tony Cho opened the panel with a number. The built environment, he told the room, "accounts for 42% of all CO2 emissions in the world," and every building out there may double or triple in size in the next thirty years. Then he asked the question the rest of the hour hung on: "Who are we building cities for? What is the point? What is the purpose? What is the intention?"

This was the AUREA Golden Future Party at Future of Cities in Miami, right after a round of dancing. Tony, who leads the work on regenerative placemaking there, called three people to the stage: Jamie Wheal, author of Stealing Fire and Recapture the Rapture; Sylvia Benito, an investor who advises family offices and works with plant medicine; and Alexandra Tohme of Future of Cities, who runs its community work in Little Haiti. The line people remembered came from Jamie, near the middle: the party was not the point.

What Jamie Wheal means by culture architecture

Jamie described his most recent book as an attempt to find "the sort of blockchain of conscious culture." The first half is neuroanthropology: why people, across tens of thousands of years, keep doing the same things to come together. Chanting at a football match or at a festival in India. Beats and rhythm. Breath patterns and holds, from the Tibetan Om Mani Padme to the Hail Mary. Aboriginal didgeridoo players using circular breathing that, he said, boosts nitric oxide fifteen times.

Once you understand why those pieces work, he argued, you can build with them. "It's sort of like the Squarespace of culture architecture. Like here's a platform that everyone can build on. Skin it yourself." Make it local to your community, your customs and your traditions. His hope is that nobody hands down one answer from the top.

"We'll have a thousand fires burning in the most beautiful way, beacon fires, right? And 990 of them will probably go out in the coming storms, but 10 will be burning bright. And we learn from those and we relight our torches from those."

Why he says the party was the portal

Tony asked him how this kind of awakening, which so far belongs to a fairly privileged and educated group, could reach the other 99 percent. Jamie started by looking at the room. He described a counterculture that has become its own uniform: the same clothes, the same hats, the same long eye contact and the same hugs. "We're a knockoff of ourselves."

The ecstatic tools are real, he said. They connect people to something larger. But if you stay at the party and keep pushing the pleasure buttons, you forget why you came.

"The party was not the point. The party was the portal."

He gave three design rules for anything meant to reach everyone. It has to be open source: no proprietary fences, shared tools. It has to be infinitely scalable, "which basically means cheap or free." And it has to be antifragile, "which means they have to get stronger as things get harder." Breath, movement, music and the body qualify. So do permaculture and paying attention to the seasons.

Then he said what he had flown in to say. He had been travelling around the world and came back for this one event because of the work happening in that building. His request to the room was blunt:

"Let's not all decide we're going to start a podcast and open up an Instagram account and do our own retreat in Costa Rica. ... Find the people who are already hard at work doing the things that matter and go help them. That's it."

Sylvia Benito on investing from presence instead of fear

Sylvia began with a question for everyone in the room: "What does it take to wake up as a human soul?" Plant medicine traditions, she said, "are carrying the architecture of awakening through thousands of years." She pointed to the mystical scale used in psychedelic research. In her account, the more strongly people report feeling one with God, the better their results on anxiety and depression.

Her own practice brings that into money. "I like to actually go into a plant medicine ceremony and look at what I'm investing in inside of a plant medicine ceremony." She was candid that this is an experiment: "It still is very much the early days of this." What she is after is the ability to judge a deal from presence rather than from fear.

Later she told a story about a shaman she once worked with. "She said, 'If anyone has over $10 million, I won't work with them.' And I was like, why? And she's like, that's hoarding." Sylvia did not offer it as a rule. She offered it as a test of how far someone is willing to look at their own scarcity thinking. "How far are you willing to go inside your own heart?"

Alexandra Tohme on building trust in Little Haiti

Tony introduced Alexandra as someone who came to Future of Cities from Lebanon, after translating the UN's Sustainable Development Goals into Arabic and working in refugee camps. Her work in Little Haiti, she said, starts with showing up to the community's own events, "coming with humility and coming with an open mind to learn."

Even in Arabic-speaking camps, inside her own culture, she found she still had a great deal to learn. That is why she pushes back on treating each neighborhood as a separate problem with a separate playbook.

"In the end of the day, we all need the clean water in our homes. We all need jobs and education for our children."

On new technology she was careful rather than excited. It can train young people who cannot afford more school and help them into work. "It's a huge tool and it can be used to do incredible good or unfortunately the other way around. So, let's use it to do good."

Tony Cho: success moves at the speed of trust

Tony returned to trust more than once. "Success moves at the speed of trust," he said, and right now trust is scarce: "We don't trust our institutions. We don't trust religion. We don't trust government. We don't trust each other."

He told the room he grew up in "an underresourced nonprofit intentional interfaith commune that my grandmother started in the 70s," and that they were never without anything, because the community was rich in food, gifts and service. He named the risk in his own field plainly: real estate development can become a form of neocolonialism when someone arrives with a vision and imposes it without deep listening. His answer is to listen first, including to indigenous tribes and their seven-generation planning, and to remember that "we have to get right within before we can be right without."

Jamie Wheal's closing: adopt your spot

Jamie closed by taking apart a line every gathering like this hears sooner or later, that you cannot solve a problem at the same level of consciousness that created it. Too often, he said, the next step is just more workshops and more ceremonies. His picture of the moment is a climber sliding down a mountain who has to get the ice axe in and dig.

The healthy version of tribalism he could name is bioregional. "So adopt your spot. Like put down roots where we live. Get to know our watersheds." Can you say what phase the moon is in? "Can we name the oak trees and the pine trees?" And "do we know our neighbors?" It starts next door, he said: "just get rooted."

Watch the full panel above.

Frequently asked questions

What did Jamie Wheal mean by "the party was the portal"?

That ecstatic experiences such as music, dance, breath and ceremony are a doorway, not a destination. They connect people to something larger, but if a community stays at the party and keeps chasing the feeling, it forgets the work the feeling was meant to open. His ask was to find people already doing work that matters and go help them.

What is culture architecture?

Jamie Wheal's term, from his book Recapture the Rapture, for the building blocks people have used for thousands of years to come together: rhythm, chanting, breath, movement and shared ritual. He wants them open source, so any community can build its own version, and he set three rules for them: open source, cheap or free, and stronger as things get harder.

What did Sylvia Benito say about plant medicine and investing?

She said she sometimes looks at her investments from inside a plant medicine ceremony, because it helps her judge from presence instead of fear and see what her soul is aligned with. She described it as an early experiment and her personal practice, not a method she prescribes.

What is regenerative placemaking?

The framework Tony Cho works on at Future of Cities for building cities and neighborhoods that are regenerative, fair and sustainable. On this panel he described it as starting with cultural preservation, respect and deep listening to the people already living in a place, so development does not impose an outside vision on them.