The biggest source of monsters — profit-based development: lending, borrowing, and speculation
We take it for granted that office buildings, hotels, housing, private houses, roads, movie houses — even parks and public buildings — are built by borrowed money and — very often — it is money borrowed from people who are speculating with money.
The effect on the world has been devastating. In the later half of the 20th century, this borrowed money has been taken too far away from the site where adaptation must be happening, thus removing the control from the process of adaptation itself.
This has happened because nowadays the money is often money that is leveraged — that means, it is money, borrowed from someone who has no interest at all in the actual thing being built and is only looking for a general, monetary return on investment.
The modern development process is based solely on money, not on tangible physical results.
The control of the project comes from the source of money; but the immediate adaptation, the connection to human beings, the connection to the land, become secondary. We are not looking, in such a project, at the prudent garnering of cash, to do the best possible for the land. We are, rather, looking at an object which is created in order to become an instrument for making money into more money — quite another thing.
The use to which the money is put, is not judged by its success as a living structure, as a living part of the community — it is judged by its ability to create cash, perhaps 10% of its value per year, perhaps even 15% or 20% of its value per year. When that becomes the motive, the impulse towards living structure usually gives way to an impulse towards something else, something that is ugly and distorted.
Three-quarters of all the urban environments that have ever been built in the history of mankind were built in the 20th century. And most of this new construction — with the one massive notable exception of squatter settlements in many countries of the world — has followed the model of “development”. Essentially, then, this is the most pervasive model of order production which humankind has invented in modern times.
But, at the same time, as I have argued, it is virtually impossible for a living environment to be created in this fashion.
Here we see a huge system effect, in which processes do not merely generate dead structure individually but as a whole, throughout the whole of society. There is an intransigent, ineluctable whole, and the system of society acts as a monolithic whole so deeply connected, so intertwined in its resistance to living structure, that its effects are far more pernicious, and present us, overall, with a very, very serious problem.
#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/19 Massive process difficulties#