This might refer to different neighbourhoods or countries, for example. This type
of concept is promoted by tourism and other simplifying ways of
experiencing and representing the world. There are three features
● It emphasizes borders.
● Each locality has a unique ‘personality’ and unified geographical
identity.
● Intrusion is seen as a threat to authenticity and/or tradition.
Arguably this concept is no longer relevant as there are no totally
isolated places left – it is a useful exercise to try and think of one. Crang
argues that it tends to ‘fossilize’ difference and may be used as part of
a defensive ‘localism’ which attempts to exclude ‘outsiders’. Racism,
for example, emanates from this worldview. Further, by fossilizing
difference, places can actually be shaped in the image that the viewers
desire. In the case of tourism it is often ‘authenticity’ and ‘tradition’
which tourists wish to see – and this is invariably ‘constructed’ and
‘frozen’ to meet this demand.
World as system. Many social scientists have looked at the interaction
of global and local through a global system perspective (WST and
dependency, for example). In this case, it is argued that local outcomes
are produced through the particular location of the place within the
broader global system at that point in time. This type of argument
counters explanations which seek to explain local differences solely in
terms of ‘internal’ characteristics (for example, modernization accounts
of development theory). This kind of cultural determinism leads to
problematic and sometimes racist explanations. For example, why is
Europe rich and Africa poor? Because there is something inherent in
European culture which makes it more productive and efficient? A
systems-based explanation argues that it is that the history of the two
regions in the context of the global system and the way this conditions
their interactions, Europe as colonizer, Africa as colonized, that explains
this inequality. Systems approaches do not always suggest that the
‘global’ conditions the ‘local’, however. The way the global unfolds
is also influenced by pre-existing conditions. It is this process of mutual
differentiation, which works both up and down the scale, which produces
difference and diversity.
World as network. More recently geographers have focused on the
concept of networks to explain links between the ‘global’ and the
‘local’, and in doing so have reflected critically on the nature of the
former. This focuses on the connections between different people and
institutions located on specific nodes across the world. In this sense the
local becomes the global and the global the local – something which
is sometimes called ‘glocalization’ (see discussion later in this chapter).
For example, Massey (1991) talks of the ‘global sense of place’ she
experiences walking down her home high street in Kilburn. She
emphasizes the links between that particular place and other parts of
the world, which have been transmitted down particular networks. Her
conclusion is that locality is constructed from its interaction with the global and that the two are inextricably intertwined in character through
such networks. As such, ‘localities are always provisional, always in the
process of being made, always contested’ (Massey, 1991, p. 29). This
argument supports the idea that what we are really referring to when we
talk about the global is localized links over a large distance. Think of
global money flows (see Box 2.1), international migration, world music,
and even the worldwide web – they are all constituted of human action
taking place in specific locations. Crang (1999, p. 33) sums this up by
arguing that:
[W]hat we have then is a global realm comprised of multidirectional,
multi-fibred networks, the geographies of which are not mappable onto
neat territories or systems. To grasp them geographers will have to get
inside those networks.