Stream 3: Glocalization in the Production of Built Environment
Ever since the late 1980s, the notion of glocalization – linguistically, a blending of “global” and “local” - has been on the agenda of academic debate (Roland Robertson) and political practice: “Think globally, act locally” was thus the central motto of the Rio world summit in 1992. The idea that universal challenges can only be resolved in local contexts prevails crucial in the discussion of environmental sustainability, too. While raising a renewed interest in “naturalness”, the proposed relationship of global thinking and local implementation has for some time been a pre-eminent issue in the context of built environment. In fact, urban and infrastructure planning and architecture are highly enlightening examples of how the concept of “glocalization” can succeed and where it fails. Creating and shaping space, these disciplines are informed by universal paradigms and standards while at the same time coping with material and social peculiarities of a given setting.
Topics
Some key questions for this session include:
- Which are the current global paradigms influencing planning and architecture? How did they develop? Do they encourage and facilitate sensitivity to local contexts?
- Who are the actors on the global and local level, are the first identical with the second? Are they connected through networks? How does the inter-level exchange work?
- At which stage in the planning process do local contexts start to matter?
- How do localized experiences influence the universal discourse? Are there specific local contexts that dominate the development of universal paradigms? How do the planning disciplines absorb and conceptualize the notion of glocalization? Is it just another twist in the long history of transnational exchange?
- What does this mean for researchers and practitioners?
Download: cfp stream3 (PDF)
Contact: stream3@tog08.org
