Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, Helsinki University of
Technology, September 2002.
Globalization
Rob Shields
Carleton University, Ottawa Canada
Outline
PAntecedents and definitions
PThe local viewpoint on globalization
Phybrids, virtuality and networks
PGeneric buildings and users
P Branded spaces
P Scales and velocities
Antecedents
PMarx / Dependency theory / Functionalist modernization theory
+Assume economic globalization but…
-Unchallenged nation-states and
-Unchanging cultural identities (eg. Amin Class and Nation 1980)
PWorld-system theory (Wallerstein The Modern World System)
-Economically deterministic
-Notion of >world’ is phenomenological not geographical (eg. Roman
Empire)
-States stabilizes this process
-Cultures remain distinct
PPolitics, law (Rosenau Turbulence in World Politics 1990)
+Multilateral institutions
-States retain sovereignty in a dual system
PCommunications
+Global village (McLuhan)
+Focus on only culture and cultural industries/communications sectors
Globalization
•‘Both the compression of the world and the intensification of
consciousness of the world as a whole…’ (Robertson).
•‘processes by which the peoples of the world are incorporated into a
single world society…’ (Albrow).
•Struggles over dissemination of notions of Western civility and civil
society
Cultural Research on Globalization
P A social process in which people become increasingly aware
that the constraints of geography on economic, political, social
and cultural arrangements are receding and act accordingly
(Waters).
Local happenings are shaped by distant events and decisions
reflexivity and localization – Glocalization
not a uni-directional Westernization
displaces integrity of the nation-state
The View from the Local
Notions of locality become harder to define…
PThe local entangled with the far-off and absent.
PCan’t distinguish local place from spaces of global flows
PLocales are >over-dimensionally’ extended
PThe local becomes less a matter of bounded, material place,
(may loose its usefulness as the basis of a point of view)
Hybrids
PFrom homogenization (McDonaldization) to hybridization...
PHybrids =
< local-global (‘glocal’ - Bauman)
< partial adoptions
< reworkings of foreign forms
P>Creolization’ =
< comes to be ‘of the place’
< provisional and changing
< not objectified, temporary
cultures have always been...
< mixed origins,
< open to the outside
< in contact with other influences
< no single path of development or guarantee of >progress’
Virtuality
Neither global nor local are material
but they are nonetheless real
PThey are intangibles, abstract notions of scale and ‘virtual’
objects like memories, traditions etc.
PThis accounts for the paradoxical quality of definitions of the
global.
P>Place’ is a hybrid entanglement of the virtual with material
Architecture and Globalization
Architecture, design and planning have been important in
globalization of a modern style and practices
PPlace and >the local’ still defended by critical regionalists as
the basis of points of view necessary for critique
PEntails a series of hybrids
PShift toward an interest in mobilities, flows of ideas and
information as well as people (knowledge)
Globalized Built Environments
PSpecific built forms characterize the emergence of a
globalized space and support services of globalization
< transportation
< travel,
< communications,
< tourism and
< international spectacles
Macdonaldization?
Characterized by:
Generic Design
>Non-place spaces’
>Branded space’
>Liminality’
Generic users
Object-mediated sociality
PGeneric design
<often defies local conditions,
< the local is merely exhibited - >staged authenticity’
< local inhabitants often excluded on the basis of class, caste
and consumer lifestyles
< not environmentally sustainable - focus of environmental
protests
P>Non-place spaces’
< total environments dominated by a devotion to mobility and
movement; to the exclusion of any sense of fixity, history or
local identity (AugJ 1995)
< subways, airports…shopping malls, >edge-city’ offices,
hotels, vacation condominia and spas...
< range of scales ‘Otto’ … ‘big box’ stores
PBranded spaces
<copyrighted
<governed by explicitly extra-architectural and extra-social
considerations
<serially produced like commodities.
<restaurant franchises, airport terminals, sports stadia
PLiminoid
<betwixt and between the >local’ and the >global’ scales
<Interfaces, portals, conduits
<switching point between different velocities, networks
1-way or 2-way street?
PWesternization vs. Hybridization vs. Generic space?
PNow understood as a process of hybridization and
>creolization'
PHas implications for the frameworks in which research
questions have be asked
PHybrids: Nature-Society / Global-Local / Human-Nonhuman
PGlobal and local are virtual objects
Local as Infrastructure

2 orders of architecture and urban space:
– Globalized (Generic)
– Local (Hybrid)

The local is a type of infrastructure – a network of resources.
Off-stage from most globalized architecture
Takes-in and creolizes generic design
A laboratory of new products, practices and ideas
Needs to be recognized and accommodated



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Issues

Access to ‘globalized’ spaces / facilities
– New Social Divisions, Exclusion


How do the disenfranchised access global flows of
resources, information (democratic access policies, grey
markets etc)?
Sustainability of mega-facilities
– Social, Economic and Environmental Costs/Benefits
 How do local places, social networks support globalized
spaces, events etc?

Examples of Creolization of globalized spaces