In the city of Augsburg in Southern Germany, one finds the Fuggerei – a public housing project which was established in 1524. It is still solvent, a pleasant community with 147 apartments in 67 buildings, where residents live for 1 Euro per year.
We take a deep dive here into the origins of the Fuggerei, the city of Augsburg, and the banker Jacob Fugger who established the community.
Wiki on the Fuggerei
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuggerei
Augsburg during the Reformation
The Richest Man Who Ever Lived: The life and times of Jacob Fugger
Augsburg Monatsbilder murals, Jörg Breau the Elder
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Augsburger_Monatsbilder
Codex Integrum
Jean Chandler historical research
#augsburg #Fugger #medieval #freistadt #Reichsstadt #renaissance #freecity #HolyRomanEmpire
11 Comments
Excellent talk. I appreciate your depth of understanding of what medieval life and social relations were really like and relating those experiences with present challenges.
Don´t forget: Jakob Fugger, sponsor of the Fuggerei, lent money to the spanish crown so they don´t go bankrupt. His money sent Columbus across the sea. His Wealth alone without his brothers was around 600 Billions USD translated. Greetings from Augsburg. Also: from the middle of the video u start to really mess up quite a number of things, so if you don´t know, sometimes its better to not say it.
I come from Augsburg, feel free to ask me anything about the place. 🙂
Diversities moved in, trashed the place, rioted and looted the local store and demanded the place be turned into section 8 housing and the government should pay 80% of the rent .
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when I first heard about it, I didn't believe it. I visited it twice, it's fascinating!
Excellent. Thanks for uploading this.
Let me try do this inside-out.
Our value is measured by our values. "Value" (for money) measures these to quite a large extent. (We make noises with our mouths about values, too, but arguably the most real values are indicated more by what we spend.)
Whether a Fuggerei is "worth the cost" is simply a matter of value judgement. If it's just to ease the pain of old age for some worthless people (not worth a cent), it's "not worth it". If there's some indirect thing of "actual value" to be gained from something like this, then that thing of value stands in for the worthlessness of the used-up people it's not possible to squeeze a single further drop of value from, and it becomes of value. (And there might be some more of that indirect value to be had by the opportunity to claim to have been a benefactor. For starters being a benefactor seems to make someone look powerful – which is clearly worth dollars rather than just cents – so is clearly of great value.)
Back to the inside. Whether some of the values that can be inferred from the imaginary thoughts of various imaginary people in the previous paragraph are good values (making them, thereby, intrinsically worthy), or are – as values – junk – gives you the final evaluation one could notionally make of something like this.
The real point, though, joining up with what you conclude with, is that whether a Fuggerei is worth as much (or maybe more) than a cookie cutter suburb, all partitioned off and reasonably uniform depends on what we're worth. Could be we're junk. Wouldn't surprise me at all if it turns out that we, ourselves, were almost worthless. It's possible, right?
Jakob Fugger was the model for Scrooge McDuck. It was his wife who made him set up the Fuggerei and he hated her for it. She was absolutely brilliant in contrast to her greedy husband.
Another interesting sojourn, thanks for sharing!
They had in those houses already door opening systems that the homeowner on the second floor could open the front door without having to go down the stairs! How cool is that?
very interesting ..quite strange how synchronicities work ..just been reading about Jacob Fugger as the subject of my book Paraselsus, the renowned alchemist worked as a boy apprenticed in the mines and Fugger owned workshops in Villach.