The Employee
There is an invisible ghost in economic values, wich you cannot experience every second but in the end you feel its impacts somehow. Cannot see it because it in the 4th dimension: “TIME”. It makes you magically save money, or evaporates money. You get your salary, the beginning of the month you see little expenses not important, buying an extra drink, having a pack of cigarettes, going to a bit more expensive restaurant, they are alright if you see a big number in your bank account every time. This psychological effect makes us in small scale thinking that we are doing fine. At one point it starts to feel insecure and then we start to se the fact : 7o percent of the salary is gone in 6 days. And there put on the brakes trying to recover from the situation and may be get in debt, if something goes wrong. A microscale example of what goes wrong all the time: forgetting the time dimension with all inputs.
On the scale of an employee, that can be quickly fixed next month, you stay home for 2 weeks and you are fine. But what if multimillion companies and even countries act this way. In architecture, cities are the “employee” making little decisions for momentary inputs, not sensing the whole. People with power (money or political force) shape the cities for their profit and make cumulative losses of energy and money in the city. That new shopping mall may bring investment to the city, but makes traffic a mess, commute times +10 minutes, making everyone lose cent by cent more than any positive input of the mall. People may approve this shopping mall construction because it is “value” without knowing end of the month it is their loss, if the calculations are done, like the guy who is buying an unnecessary pack of cigarettes every day for momentary joy and losing thousands of euros every year on that habit. For the second it was a good idea, it relaxes, but in total it makes you not being able to go to that winter vacation. It lowers “social welfare” which cannot be measured momentarily. You have to wait for the end of the month, even a decade to see the results of yor investment.
Recycling is Bullshit
This not computable, not measurable ghost of losing or saving money or resources is there again at the issue of recycling. People are obsessed with it, they feel good about it, even they think they save the world, save money for the nation and be a good person. That is something to do with a lot of benefits. At one point some people started discussing about the topic, putting every day hundreds of trucks with 4 different puroses for collecting organic, glass, paper, and metal (even plastic etc.) is a good idea for a city like Frankfurt. What you gain for that is worth what people have to wait behind big garbage trucks for minutes before going to work (they are already stressed) and consuming fossile fuels. What about them being spectical and obsessed about their consumption, in the end does a recycling factory do a benefit to the city with his ugly fog? Unmeasurable effects on the nation are visible, personally i was pretty stressed in Germany, sometimes i didnt know what category was my garbage, my flatmates were obsessed, i kept garbage in my room and in a dark night took it out threw it in the river. (the story might be a little fictional after some beers)
The Architect
The architect, who wants to speak about sustainability, and economic value generation, has to include a wide angle vision in his design with help of different disciplines, calculating the impact on the “city”, “nation” even “world”. Even if he will not be asked for every question politically or economically, even if he is not expected to answer, the vision is important, from the first line of the design, it is possible to think about sustainability on large scale, local resources, social impacts, energy and traffic congestion inputs even what will happen with the building after 50 years should be put on the first line of the design. So that we are not victims of the invisible money sucking monster at the end of the month, and we can go to that winter vacation.