New section dedicated to 'smart' localism, Translocalism, Multi-Local Societies

Introduction

• Ezio Manzini: Small, Local, Open and Connected As Way of the Future
• Reasoned Localization and Selective Deglobalization. Discussion excerpted from Christian Arnsperger.
• Four Stages of Temporal-Spatial Organization in Human History. Jason F. McLennan. [1]

See also:

• Re-localisation, as Alternative Globalisation ; 'p2p' discussion by Jose Ramos and Michel Bauwens
• Phyles, a globa-local mutualist association for business, centered around a commons

Typology

Benjamin Life:

"Localism is the simple recognition that those closest to a challenge are usually best positioned to solve it. It’s about rooting governance, economic activity, and cultural practice in relationship to place and to each other.

This takes different forms depending on context:

Political localism looks like participatory budgeting, neighborhood assemblies, municipal innovation — decentralizing authority to the people living with the consequences of decisions.

Economic localism means building local ownership through cooperatives, community currencies, shorter supply chains — keeping value circulating where it’s generated rather than extracting it elsewhere.

Cultural localism is strengthening the stories, heritage, and practices that root people in place — the foundation of resilience when everything else becomes uncertain.

Ecological localism means stewarding the watersheds, forests, and soil systems that actually sustain life — governance grounded in bioregional reality rather than arbitrary political boundaries.

Ethereum localism uses blockchain-based tools — payments, attestations, governance mechanisms, open data — to help communities coordinate without centralized middlemen extracting value from every interaction."

(https://opencivics.substack.com/p/localism-fund-nurturing-self-organizing)

Sacha Pignot on the Three Levels of the Cosmo-Local Fractal Sovereignty Stack

Sacha Pignot identifies three levels of Fractal Sovereignty:

Hyper-Localism (micro level)

"The Connected Foundation:

Hyper-localism in fractal sovereignty isn’t isolation—it’s creating resilient foundation layers that can participate meaningfully in larger networks.

This includes:

- Household production: Food preservation, craft production, repair culture, energy generation

- Community workshops: Shared tools, skill exchanges, local fabrication capabilities

- Neighborhood resource sharing: Tool libraries, community kitchens, local currency systems

- Immediate ecosystem management: Watershed stewardship, local food systems, micro-grids

The key innovation: these systems maintain full autonomy over production processes and resource allocation while accessing global knowledge networks when beneficial. A community workshop using locally sourced wood can access global design innovations while maintaining control over working conditions.

Bioregionalism (meso level)

The Ecological Integration level:

"Bioregionalism organizes human activity along ecological boundaries rather than political ones. Watersheds, climate zones, ecosystems, and natural resource patterns define the scale of coordination, creating economic systems that work with ecological processes rather than against them.

In fractal sovereignty, bioregions function as meso-scale networks connecting multiple hyper-local communities while respecting ecological carrying capacity. Different communities might specialize—agriculture, manufacturing, knowledge work—while sharing resources and coordinating to maintain ecological balance.

Bioregional coordination operates through network dynamics rather than hierarchical control. Communities share information about resource availability, ecological conditions, production capacity, and needs through distributed networks while maintaining local autonomy."

Cosmo-Localism (macro level)

The Global Knowledge, Local Control level:

Unlike linear globalism creating disconnected extremities, cosmo-localism follows an ouroboros pattern—a cycle where global knowledge flows back to enhance local capacity, which in turn contributes to global knowledge.

This creates a regenerative loop rather than extractive pipeline: local innovations get documented and shared globally, global knowledge gets adapted to local conditions, and the cycle continues with each iteration building capacity at all scales."

(https://soushi888.substack.com/p/beyond-local-vs-global)

Visualizations

This graphic from John Robb shows the evolution of manufacturing from mass manufacturing to globa-local distributed custom manufacturing, giving a timeline for its realization as well.

• 

  Location of production

Related Wiki sections

• Global Villages
• P2P Urbanism
• Globalocal food developments

Key Quotes

With the advent of the P2P Mode of Production, the community and its common is now the appropriate scale

"We’re seeing something that is historically shocking—the reduction to zero of the cost of an especially valuable part of capital, which materializes directly knowledge (free software, free designs, etc.). And above all we see, almost day by day, how the optimum size of production, sector by sector, approaches or reaches the community dimension.

The possibility for the real community, the one based on interpersonal relationships and affections, to be an efficient productive unit is something radically new, and its potential to empower is far from having been developed. This means that we are lucky enough to live in a historical moment when it would seem that the whole history of technology, with all its social and political challenges, has coalesced to put us within reach of the possibility of developing ourselves in a new way and contributing autonomy to our community.

Today we have an opportunity that previous generations did not: to transform production into something done, and enjoyed, among peers. We can make work a time that is not walled off from life itself, which capitalism revealingly calls “time off.” That’s the ultimate meaning of producing in common today. That’s the immediate course of every emancipatory action. The starting point."

- David de Ugarte [2]

The Local, indispensable holon of the Commons

"There is a rising restoration of the idea of location being important. Where you see this happening, you see commons forming. I've spent a bit of time thinking about why. Karl pointed out that our current era since the Enlightenment has increasingly applied the principle of "nowhere" to try to reduce things to abstract principles, rules, laws, facts, etc. It was powerful and much needed to push us along the way. However, it removes necessary context and dynamics both within and between systems. Localism counters that by restoring context and recognizing that the observers can't be disentangled from the system. Culture is a key part of a working commons, since culture is one of the key ways we store accumulated community knowledge and changing culture means that new knowledge is being stored, or at the very least a recognition that the system is changing and parts of the old culture don't fit. Commons & culture aren't "nowhere". They require place. A truly global commons isn't one thing. It is a billions interlocking, intersecting, and scaled commons all working together as an environment. A commons is a holon. Each holonarchic level of a global commons has a sense of place. People + Place = Community & shared culture. "

- Tim Morgan [3]

Key Resources

Key Articles

• Why Localization is Inevitable in a Resource-Scarce World. By Fred Curtis, David Ehrenfeld. Solutions Journal, Jan 2012 [4]

Key Educational Resources

Localization Seminar. A syllabus for a course or reading group on the topic of localization.

Key Policy Resources

• Great Localization: Policy recommendations from the New Economics Institute: