schmoozy space Mark Szpakowski's szpace blog

I got an e-mail notice about Money and Intentional Economics: Developing an Integral Vision, A Symposium with Bernard Lietaer, at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, July 7-9. This led me to an interview with him, which was a real eye-opener. Lietaer was co-designer of the Euro and of the process whereby it got implemented, and has worked with currency trading and electronic payment systems on a major scale.

One key insight: money is not value neutral. Introduction of  competitive programmed currencies has destroyed societies.  Making use of complementary currencies, such as time dollars, which can act in addition to the existing currency, can transform the planet:

I believe that by a small change in the money system, we can unleash huge improvements in our social system. It's the highest leverage point for change in our society, and surprisingly few people are looking at it. If you start a new complementary currency system, it can become self-perpetuating and facilitate additional transactions forever.

Private currencies are coming back - think air miles, and how credit cards and virtual currencies are starting to blend. The Balinese already participate in a dual-currency system, and benefit from how complementary currencies strengthen social bonds. Some key quotes:

Complementary currencies simply enable additional matches between unmet needs and unused resources.

The point is: if money is an agreement within the community to use something as a medium of exchange, we can create new agreements, can't we?

For more, check out the Access Foundation, an "Alliance of Complementary Currencies Enabling Sustainable Societies".

The Long Now Foundation's Seminars About Long-term Thinking are available online, in audio (MP3 and Ogg Vorbis) and in some cases text formats. Presenters include Brian Eno, Danny Hillis, Peter Schwartz, Bruce Sterling, Stewart Brand, Paul Hawken, and others.

The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996* to develop the Clock and Library projects, as well as to become the seed of a very long term cultural institution. The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide counterpoint to todays "faster/cheaper" mind set and promote "slower/better" thinking. We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.
* The Long Now Foundation uses five digit dates, the extra zero is to solve the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect in about 8,000 years.

A model for the Long Now Foundation is the Shinto Shrine at Ise, which is rebuilt every 20 years:

Its first incarnation was in 04 C.E. This type of design, which utilises ephemeral materials while capitalizing on the human element, is a great inspiration for The Long Now Foundation. This object has done something which Stonehenge and the Great Pyramids have not; it aided the survival of its institution.

I visited Poland last week, and one of the highlights was the city of Krakow, seat of the Kings of Poland, home to a legendary dragon on Wawel Hill, and the site of Europe's largest town square.

This picture only shows a tenth of the square, which accommodates horse carriages, several buildings, and numerous umbrella-covered cafes and restaurants.

This inspired me to think about transforming Halifax's Grand Parade into a town square: close off Barrington and Argyle Streets to car traffic, and voila, you have something similar, albeit much smaller, framed by some of Halifax's oldest buildings, a venue for current life.

Eastlink, which provides high speed internet over cable to the Halifax area, just announced that it now supports download speeds of up to 10 megabits per second. This is awesome, the word used as the subjective rating by Bandwidth Speed Test, which I used to measure the actual speed. My result came in at 5 megabits/second, downloading a 1 meg file in 1.7 seconds. For shared access (how many users in my cable block?) this is pretty darn good.

So Halifax is extraordinarily well-favoured with high-speed internet access: how can we put this to good use?

It's the tenth year now for the Economy Shoe Shop, and it's celebrating with the Argyle Street Faire, Saturday May 28th, 1 pm to midnight. The story:

Ten years ago Victor Syperek and David Henry opened a modest 70 seat licensed café... A fixture on Halifax's entertainment landscape, the "Shoe" is known as the place where creative ideas are hatched. Ideas that have led to many successful music, film, advertising and business endeavours that got their start within the walls of this now "world-renowned" establishment.

Seems to me the upcoming event, and to some extent the Shoe Shop itself, are a Village Square, and are the types of activity Envision Halifax can link to and nurture further. Speaking of which, Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language, a great resource for building for conviviality, has this to say on Small Public Squares:

A town needs public squares; they are the largest, most public rooms, that a town has. But when they are too large, they look and feel deserted... A person's face is just recognizable at about 70 feet; and under typical urban noise conditions, a loud voice can just barely be heard across 70 feet... Make a public square much smaller than you would first imagine; usually no more than 45 to 60 feet across, never more than 70 feet across. This applies only to its width in the short direction. In the long direction it can certainly be longer.

Geoff LeBoutillier sent me Rich Campbell's dedication to the Bluff Wilderness Hiking Trail, made at the Trailhead on June 5, 2004, International Trails Day:

On behalf of all the wild things that make this land their home and with reverence for the First People who preserved this land before us, we dedicate the Bluff Wilderness Hiking Trail to wilderness preservation. We do this in trust that we can learn its deep beauty, in trust that we can understand and delight in the wildness in ourselves that we share with the rocks, earth, water, and teeming life and spirits that surround us, and in trust that we will work together to protect this sacred heritage.

Woodens River Watershed Environmental Organization

That says it all. It's places like this that help connect with that wildness in ourselves, which I think is a crucial part of our education as citizens of this earth. Such wildness is not crazy, but the rock bed of true sanity.

Envision Halifax's volunteer coordinator, Tracy Boyer, now has her own blog. Check it out, feel free to post comments, and add it to your feeds - she'll keep you informed of what's happening, what's getting posted to the Envision Halifax web site, etc.

O'Reilly Radar blogs Stewart Brand's A World Made of Cities (cf also his recent Environmental Heresies article). Some quotes:

Cities are humanity's longest-lived organizations (Jericho dates back 10,500 years), but also the most constantly changing.

Every week in the world a million new people move to cities.One of the effects of globalization is to empower cities more and more. Communications and economic activities bypass national boundaries.

One-sixth of humanity, a billion people, now live in squatter cities ("slums") and millions more are on the way. Governments try everything to head them off, with total failure. Squatter cities are vibrant places. They're self-organized and self-constructed.

I think a large-scale, long-term environmental strategy for urbanization is needed, two-pronged. One, take advantage of the emptying countryside (where the trees and other natural systems are growing back fast) and preserve, protect, and restore those landscape in a way that will retain their health when people eventually move back. Two, bear down on helping the growing cities to become more humane to live in and better related to the natural systems around them. Don't fight the squatters. Join them.

I'll be blogging here, in the Envision Halifax category, on Halifax, Nova Scotia (satellite image).

The Envision Halifax meme is to ignite a culture of civic engagement.

Perhaps this could include conversations acting like nitrogen-fixing bacteria. Can weblogs cultivate long-term distributed discourse?