Ultra-Cosmolocalism

Description

Mixel Kiemen:

"The basic intuition behind cosmolocalism is attractively simple: communities build locally while sharing and learning globally. Knowledge can circulate across the world with little cost, while production becomes more responsive to local resources, capabilities and needs. The principle is sometimes summarised as design global, manufacture local.

Put even more simply, one might say: anything heavy stays local. Yet this is not quite what we observe. Some of the world’s most advanced industries concentrate enormous physical infrastructure, specialised equipment and human capability in particular places, only to produce extraordinarily complex machines that are then packed up and transported across the world.

Today’s lithography machines are an extreme example: highly localised capabilities produce machines of enormous complexity that become critical components of global production networks. This points towards a deeper pattern that we will examine throughout this article. The more interesting question is what can be traded — and what keeps us save.

In the 4GU book, I use the term ultra-cosmolocalism for this deeper structure. High-tech does not simply replace global production with local production. Instead, entire systems — energy, industry, data and increasingly intelligence — become integrated across geographical scales. Local ecosystems become highly specialised nodes within tightly coupled global infrastructures.

Ultra-cosmolocalism therefore combines two movements that can initially appear contradictory. Global supply chains remain essential, while regional capabilities become more important. As commodity production becomes increasingly local, it is enabled by a global high-tech supply chain capable of producing the nanoscale tools that make this localisation possible.

This is where the geopolitical transition starts to touch the evolution of the university. If sustainable prosperity increasingly depends on what a region can uniquely contribute to a global system, the ability to cultivate knowledge, talent and institutional capability over long periods becomes economically strategic. The Fourth Generation University begins to appear within this transition as one of the institutions through which regions can consciously develop that capacity."

(https://mixelkiemen.substack.com/p/4gu-reshaping-the-economy-in-times?)