THE POWER OF LOCALISM: Architectural Localism as Damage Control in the Face of Globalism and Digitisation

摘要

The postcolonial literary theorist Gayatri Spivak has written that globalisation takes place only in the immaterial realms of data and capital. Everything else - the humanities, aesthetics and even daily life - is relegated to damage control.1 While architectural ideas and construction products circulate around the globe, building is always local, and remains the most material form of resistance to globalisation. Born at the tail end of the baby boom, my generation witnessed the social revolutions of the 1960s as children rather than participants. We began professional practice in architecture during the 1980s, with the radical ideals of our immediate seniors in our heads, but the reality of a new world order around us. Our professional coming of age coincided with the beginning of the neoliberal, revanchist counter-revolution that replaced progressive secular socialism with a return of religious fundamentalism and market capitalism.2 As witnesses to this shift, we became translators of the ideals of the 1960s to the next generation of architects who carried on the project of local resistance to the social and environmental damage that results from digital and financial globalisation.