Human Place: The Dialectic of the Global and the Local

Leonardo, Vol. 15, No.2, pp. 137-139, 1982 Printed in Great Britain 0024-094X/82/020 137-03$03.00/0 Pergamon Press Ltd. HUMAN PLACE: THE DIALECTIC OF THE GLOBAL AND THE LOCAL* John A. Clauser** I. INTRODUCTION In a series ofconferences held between 1972and 1979, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) defined human culture as 'the spiritual enrichment of the human personality ... a social phenomenon resulting from individuals joining and cooperating in creative activities'. This definition suggests that true participation in cultural life must take place in local contexts, in environments scaled to human time and human space where an individual's physical senses and perceptions can be employed most directly. In contrast, a persistent present-day notion holds that local contexts are now anachronistic, because they fail to provide the larger conceptual possibilities offered by a global or transcultural view of existence. Such beliefs have currency because industrialized cultures have achieved a more or less global view of the world, rooted, for the most part, in perceptual data yielded by new communications technologies. Moreover, conventional wisdom has it that globalism will ultimately provide a new and grand unity of purpose for all mankind and that it will banish disorder and chaos by sweeping aside the archaic remains of localism, regionalism and provincialism. At the same time, no one seriously questions the enormous potential benefits a global perspective offers to the world, with its promise of enhanced understanding, an open flow of information and crucial transcultural dialogues. But on balance one should be mindful that the global worldview had its roots not only in the transcendent aspirations of the Enlightenment, but, equally, in the rise of an industrialization dedicated to unremitting growth, on the one hand, and to the paradigm of Progress, on the other. II. THE MASTER IMAGE OF GLOBALISM The hallmark of the Industrial Era was its organizing power to develop values and attitudes aimed at the establishment of a far-reaching unity: industrial civilization committed to operations on a planetary scale. This commitment meant that global perspectives had to be stressed at the expense of the local, so that industrial cultures and their environments could be productive, uniformly regulated and manageable. In due course the new industrial environment came to be viewed as an *An abridged version of the background paper prepared for the Arts and Environments Project of the Yellow Springs Fellowship for the Arts (address given below). **Architect and administrator, Yellow Springs Fellowship for the Arts, Art School Road, Chester Springs, PA 19425, U.S.A. enormous machine whose components could be shaped and altered at will in response to the utilitarian needs of mechanized progress. Progress, of course, became the key word and the central symbol of the new era. Through it, the present could be connected to a promised New Age located somewhere in the future. By the turn of the 20th century the progressive vision mandated an unquestioned faith in the 'new' while demanding a conscious turning away from older values. New organizational principles and unprecedented new bureaucracies were mustered to facilitate rapidly expanding networks of power, transport and communications. Entire nations soon adopted a vigorous muscular ideal that emphasized order, efficiency and mobility. Older cities were eviscerated and modernized to permit growth in transport, manufacture and management and to facilitate the logistical management of a vast new labor pool. With the growth of urban industry, people were assembled for the first time by hundreds of thousands and, eventually, by millions. Ancient social ties were ruptured, and mass migrations by job-seeking workers uprooted a myriad of symbolic and emotional attachments to 'place', to cultural continuity and to roots. The new reality of industrial economics interacted with a new mobility in transport, so that one's 'place' was not important so long as productivity was maintained. In the second half of this century the spatial arrangements of the physical city are being seen as ever more obsolescent. Even though humans have organized themselves spatially for more than a million years, the global vision now infers that they should forsake spatiality in favor of a new, ephemeral communications 'network', where high-speed media can transcend physical space...