Towards an underground currency
Town &
Country Planning, November 1999
Regular readers of this column - if there are any - will know that I regard Crystal Palace as an idyllic spot, like a cross between Welwyn Garden City and the Lost World.
Its peace is unfortunately being shattered by a crass development plan which involves building a multiplex cinema on the park, with space for 1,000 cars on its roof - but that's the kind of thing you get in a place which turns out to be the inter-section of five London boroughs.
Worse is to come. There's now a second undesirable development proposal down the road in East Dulwich. Sainsbury's wants to build a new Homebase superstore on the site of the local football club, which will in turn be shifted onto a rare slice of green common land.
Won't people quite like having a Homebase, you might ask - especially in a corner of London as wedded to DIY as we are? Hasn't greenery got to give way in the name of progress? Well maybe. But this is where it gets hard to measure projects and neighbourhoods simply in terms of money traded across the New York and Tokyo exchanges every day.
Measure the Homebase plan like that, and it may look like progress. But then that takes no account of the more subtle 'wealth' which would be destroyed by it.
There's the green space and psychic health this kind of informal environment engenders. Then there's Lordship Lane, and its multiplicity of small hardware shops, most of which will probably put out of business by Homebase's indifferent and identikit fare.
So here's the issue. Do we have the diversity of small DIY shops, which stock a bizarre range of gadgets, with friendly local staff who know everybody will give you the benefit of their years of DIY experience - or do we have to put up with the ignorant and disinterested staff from Homebase?
Do we have the shops which recirculate the money you pay them over and over again in the local economy - or do we have it going to a large conglomerate that collects it up every night and sends it down the wires to the City of London, or wherever Sainsbury's keeps its money overnight these days?
And how do we invent new kinds of money that can tell the difference between the two - at least better than the inaccurate measuring system we now use, which discounts the former 'wealth' and can't recognise the latter?
I've already been involved in the first discussions to create a London Barter Exchange, and that would launch a London currency. That would begin to give us better feedback - though a parallel Crystal Palace currency might provide something even more useful to us. As long as it wasn't the only currency on offer.
The local DIY shops would probably accept London Pounds or Crystals, at least for part of each transaction. Homebase wouldn't be able to, just as the multinationals are not able to accept some of the most successful local currencies in the world from Blue Mountain LETS in Australia to Ithaca Hours in upstate New York. It makes you think.
But then something came along which made me think even more. London Underground have announced a £1 billion-plus project for a smartcard system, which will allow us Londoners to pay for our trips by electronic card and to refill the cards when they run out.
I'm not party to the Underground's plans, but common sense would suggest that they could denominate the 'money' on the cards in journey units rather than money. If they did it in money they might have to change the technology every time they put their prices up, which happens with sickening frequency in London, let me tell you.
Now here's the clever bit. London Underground may then find they have created a de facto regional currency, which can be redeemed in journeys - and is therefore not subject to inflation - which we can use to buy a range of other things in the informal and maybe formal economy too.
Why shouldn't bars have a particularly happy hour when they accept part payment in 'underground'? Why shouldn't we launch a range of new babysitting circles and 'favours' groups which exchange 'underground'? Maybe we could even arrange zero-interest loans in 'underground' - you never know?
It would need a new level of technology to allow us to exchange them electronically, but the currency would be trustworthy and able to underpin a range of semi-economic activities which are simply not viable in an international currency like euros or pounds.
But best of all, the identikit brand names like Homebase probably wouldn't accept them. That means we might get to keep one of those rare open green parts of south London.
David Boyle is an associate of the New Economics Foundation and the author of Funny Money (www.funny-money.co.uk)
