Interdependent Relationship Between Locality and Universality
Discussion
Ralph Horat and Jan Baeriswyl:
“The perception of locality and universality shapes our social and historical consciousness, as well as our sense of belonging in a fundamental way. Locality is the spatial dimension where our life takes place in the here and now, whereas Universality is the imagined reality of us as part of the human community which transcends our local and personal world and gives us a sense of our shared responsibility and common future. While the greatest challenges of our civilization are of global nature and therefore have to be addressed on a global level, they require at the same time local action. The epic universal feeling that we can transcend all boundaries as a human species, is nothing more than an unattainable light on the horizon when this momentum remains locally absent. Hence, we need to interconnect these two dimensions in a new meaningful way, which is possible for the first time 10 The term was originally used by the environmental scientist Wolfgang Sachs (2010) who wrote: «Cosmopolitan localism seeks to amplify the richness of a place while keeping in mind the rights of a multifaceted world. It cherishes a particular place, yet at the same time knows about the relativity of all places. It results from a broken globalism as well as a in history due to the global information and communication network. In the following, we use the term “Cosmo-localism10” to express this newly emerging and interdependent relationship between locality and universality. As a consequence, it is not enough to just simply build a high-tech “off-grid” village but to take on a pioneering role in shaping this new world in the digital sphere and putting it in a symbiotic relationship with the physical space. It seems important that physical spaces scale in a manner that supports their livability. Lessons from biomimicry in general to self-organizing systems in particular converge on a fractal hierarchy as an organizing structure. In this chapter, we imagine how the structural architecture within the cosmo-local network could look like at different scales.”