Prof. Dr. Margrit Kennedy was an architect with a Masters Degree in Urban and Regional Planning and a Ph.D. in Public and International Affairs. Over the span of her long career, she published books, articles and reports on community school planning and building, women and architecture, urban ecology, permaculture, money, land and tax systems. She also practised architecture and urban planning in Brazil, Nigeria, Scotland, the USA and Germany and worked as a professor for Ecological Building Technologies at the Department of Architecture, University of Hanover.
For more than 28 years, she lived in the eco-village of Lebensgarten in Steyerberg, Lower Saxony. In 1982, her work in ecological architecture led her to the discovery that it is virtually impossible to carry out sound ecological concepts on the scale required today without fundamentally altering the present money system or creating new complementary currencies.
Her book ‘Interest and Inflation-Free Money, Creating an Exchange Medium that works for Everybody and Protects the Earth’ was published first in 1987 and updated and revised in 1995: Seva International, Mumbai, India & Okemos, Michigan, USA – wcbpllc@voyager.net.
As a consultant in complementary currencies, she helped in the preparation for creating a sustainable money system with demurrage for the planned international city of Auroville, India, for (the city of Santiago de) Cali, Columbia, and for different regions in Argentina, Germany and New Zealand. From 1988 – 2004 Margrit and her husband, Prof. Declan Kennedy, ran international workshops on different aspects of monetary reform, in both English and German, in Steyerberg, Germany.