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The imperatives driving individual acquisition contrast with the communal Fete de Crepissage, or festival of plastering,
an annual spring ritual undertaken by the people ofDjenne in Mali, in which the community applies a n ew layer of mud to
the Great Mosque to r eplace that washed away in torrential rains
investment properties exist not as useful commodities but as
a form of general-purpose money - repositories for storing capital.
Alf Hornborg, professor of Human Ecology at Lund University
in Sweden, argues that the tendency to push everything towards
being general-purpose money is the underlying cause of many
destructive aspects of the contemporary global economy.
Organising society so that rainforests and Coca-Cola are traded
in the same market doesn't just enable, but drives environmentally
disastrous decision-makjng.
For Hornborg, general-purpose money incentivises the maximum
exploitation of differences in wage levels and environmental
legislation, reinforcing the notion that 'best value' means cheapest
in cash terms no matter the real planetary and social cost.
He proposes an alternative in the form of complementary local
currencies. Complementary currencies could recognise t hat
enumerating something's value doesn't have to degrade it to such
an extent t hat it can be swapped for anything at all given sufficient
quantit ies. Instead trading could take place between linked groups
of goods such that no amount of fizzy drinks could be exchanged
for felling trees. Just as in urbanism, planning use classes frame how
land can be traded based on its purpose, so complementary
currencies could organise the trading of other resources. The land,
materials and labour which go into the creation of schools,
for example, might be traded in a wholly separate marketplace as
those which go into luxury flats, r adically reorganising their price.
But architects don't simply assemble a collection of elements
in such a way as to make them useful, value is created on top of that.
Architects create something that, at its best, nurtures emotionally,
bringing delight and solace. They hope to help people feel a presence
of beauty around them, to rouse dynamic feelings of civic duty or
playful exhilaration; to feel ordered, awestruck or at peace among
many other emotional states. But when these effects are measured
in pounds and pence, the rich tapestry of value that architects can
weave becomes frayed. Unique houses for eccentric clients are
not designed because architects are mindful of resale price. More
perniciously, nothing can be designed that isn't valued according to
the current economic framework. Architecture as general-purpose
money is liquid but dreary, without idiosyncrasy, or generosity.
If we could unpack our understandings of value and money - if we
could skip the socialised mental leap from one to the other, perhaps
this could liberate wider value-creating endeavours like
architecture. Perhaps it would allow us to create a broader range of
built value which has worth in its own right without t he need to be
weighed in terms of liquidity. Architecture could be very different if
its quantification in general-purpose money weren't part of the brief,
if it wasn't necessary to make it tradable for anything else of