Local - A Global Search for an Idea.

I am in the early stages of writing a book about the idea of the local and the associated agenda of localism. The book will be a mixture of travelogue, memoir, and thinking alongside others about what the local can offer in a range of global contexts – a range of “locals”. The title I am working with is Local – A Global Search for an Idea. My hope is that it will feature chapters on, among other things, local food, local knowledge, and local politics, each in a different place and centered on different thinkers and activists and their ideas. What follows are some introductory words I have been working on that give, I hope, a sense of where the book will go.

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The Lure of the Local is the pull of place that operates on all of us, exposing our politics and our spiritual legacies. It is the geographical component of the psychological need to belong somewhere, one antidote to a prevailing alienation.

Lucy Lippard

We are living in a time when the idea of “the local” is resurgent. Right across the political spectrum we see calls for forms of localism in the face of various forms of globalism. The moral currency of the local is perhaps one of the few ideas that transcends political affiliation. The contemporary right and alt-right in the United States pits itself against the global and the globalists who allegedly promote it. Calls to localism have been at the centre of the neo-reactionary worldview of Donald Trump and his followers. Shortly after he was elected President, Trump told the crowd at one of his large rallies in Hershey, Pennsylvania, that “People talk about how we’re living in a globalized world, but the relationships people value most are local—family, city, state, and country. Local, folks, local.”^[1] In the United Kingdom, forms of localism have been at the heart of traditional Conservative philosophy. The late Roger Scruton, philosopher and advisor to Conservative governments, has made the case for a Conservative brand of green thought based on the observation that “There is no political cause more amenable to the conservative vision than that of the environment. For it touches on the three foundational ideas of our movement: trans-generational loyalty, the priority of the local and the search for home.”^[2] Broadly left of centre and liberal cultural lifestyle choices have, for a long time, bought into the idea of the local as an unquestioned good – particularly when it relates to environmental action and food consumption.  In Vancouver, the co-founder of the 100-mile diet - a diet where consumers only eat things grown and produced from within 100 miles - J.B. McKinnon declared that “distance is the enemy of awareness.”^[3] Recent responses to the COVID pandemic have drawn on the anarchist tradition of mutual aid instigated by the Russian geographer Peter Kropotkin who posited the value of local cooperation over the large scale workings of the state.^[4] In each case, and from radically opposed political starting points, the scale of the local has been valorized and opposed to the implicitly or explicitly immoral or unethical machinations of processes working at bigger scales. The question here is why? Why do so many thinkers and activists value the local when they disagree about pretty much everything else?

            There are many reasons for the valorization of the local that probably transcend political divisions but it certainly worth pausing to think about some of its negative consequences. There is something that connects the seemingly positive desire to eat local food, or frequent a local business, or even to help each other out in COVID inspired effort at mutual aid, with the clearly negative labelling of outsiders as deviant – to parochialism and xenophobia. Alongside the positive moral valance of the local is a long history of derogatory terms associated with the local. The word “parochial” originated in the term for a parish and has come to mean “limited” or “narrow” – a lack of ability to deal with wider contexts. The term “local yokel” suggests rural backwardness, a lack of civilization, parochialism and what Marx and Engels termed “the idiocy of rural life”.^[5] Clearly frequenting farmers’ markets as a sign of cosmopolitan belonging is somewhat paradoxical.

This book addresses this resurgence of the local in contemporary life asking why it is that we might value people and things that are close to us more than people and things that far away and  why  the idea of the local, at the current moment, is invested with moral, ethical and political worth in so many disparate contexts? In addition to the observation that forms of localism appear across the political spectrum this quest is informed by four prompts. The first prompt is a reflection on my own life - a life in which I never lived anywhere for longer than seven years and have become, over the course of 59 years, a fully paid-up member of what people on the right call the “liberal cosmopolitan elite”. The second is the experience of living through the COVID pandemic that began in late 2019 and whose effects continue as I write, a time in which the possibilities, and necessities, of the local have become glaringly apparent. The third prompt, no doubt related to my rootless existence, is a life as a geographer and poet reflecting on and writing about the themes of “place” and “mobility” in both academic and poetic registers. The final prompt is reflecting on the kind of place I now inhabit, the prosperous Edinburgh neighbourhood of Morningside where the local is promoted as a way of life.

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When I was born, in 1965 in Cambridge, England I was the latest of 400 years of Cresswells in my paternal line born within 100 miles of the spot where I was born. The Cresswells were a remarkably immobile lot, mostly agricultural labourers with a smattering of carpenters, innkeepers and a miller who ran a windmill. Their places of birth ranged from Ipswich, in Suffolk up to King’s Lynn, in Norfolk. The most notable move happened when my third great grandfather, Edward Cresswell, moved from Ipswich to West Lexham in Norfolk sometime in the 1840s. He became a gardener and, eventually, the innkeeper of the Red Lion pub. So, while my ancestors in the Cresswell line were very fixed in place through inhabitation, work on the land, and in significant centers of local lives, such as pubs and mills, all of this changed when I was born.

At the age of 58, I have never lived anywhere for longer than seven years. My dad was in the Royal Air Force, an engineer on the new fleet of nuclear V-Bombers in RAF Marham in Norfolk. It was there he met my mum, the daughter of evacuees from the Isle of Dogs in East London.  Mum’s family, like dad’s had been largely confined to a relatively small area – London, particularly the East End, and the nearby counties of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire. Dad’s Air Force job made our life unusually globally mobile. By the age of two I was living in Berlin, where my brother was born (quite a change from 400 years of East Anglia). Then there was Oxfordshire near RAF Brize Norton, then, between the ages of seven and ten, Singapore at the fag-end of Empire. Back to Oxfordshire, and off to Woolverstone Hall, a state-run Boarding School near Ipswich where military kids mixed with children from inner London. I went to university at University College London (3 years), very much a “first generation” student before I knew there was such a designation. My reading of the work of Yi-Fu Tuan and others made me an enthusiastic geographer and I flew off to Madison, Wisconsin, to undertake my PhD with Yi-Fu as my supervisor. I lived in Madison for six years and it was there I met my wife, Carol, and from there we moved to Connecticut (six months), Lampeter (in Wales, 7 years), Aberystwyth (also in Wales, 5 years), Acton (London, 7 years), Boston (3 years), West Hartford (Connecticut, 3 years) and now Edinburgh (5 years and counting). Since arriving in Wisconsin in 1986, I have had fifteen home addresses responding to the possibilities opened up by my academic career and the fact of a trans-Atlantic family.

As well as moving house, I have spent a considerable amount of time travelling. I have very clear memories of flying to Singapore on an air force VC 10, stopping along the way in Cyprus and at RAF Gan, in the Maldives. The excitement of flying was mixed with the feeling of everything being different as I exited the plane into heavy tropical air and unaccustomed heat. I equally recall arriving back at RAF Brize Norton three years later and the feeling of wet-cold and the taste of full fat milk coating my tongue. While in Singapore I became accustomed to the excitement of different kinds of food including the mee goreng with red hot chilli sauce from a modest stand on the air base, and the thin sticks of chicken satay and thick peanut sauce with chunks of cooling cucumber. These were served off the back of an improbable bicycle that included the necessary charcoal fire just behind the saddle. The person who pedaled the bike and made the satay was an equally improbable sinewy and elderly man who I worried might expire at any minute. All of this was, of course, a highly unusual set of experiences for the child of two parents who left school at sixteen. Military life was one of the few ways I was ever likely to have travelled, or to have encountered these foods, in this way. There is no doubt that this experience has marked my general disposition towards travel since then. At an early age I became aware of how places are different and learned to enjoy those differences. In terms of the local this meant two paradoxical things. One was a love of the possibilities that local difference offered and the other was the recognition that I needed to be in some sense global in order to experience these possibilities. I became, over time, a global being forever in search of the novelty that comes with the fact of the local. The geographer Doreen Massey put it well when she asked us to understand space (as opposed to time) “as the sphere of the possibility of multiplicity in the sense of contemporary plurality; as the sphere in which distinct trajectories coexist; as the sphere therefore of coexisting heterogeneity.”^[6] Moving through space, in other words, is how we experience that fact that things are or could be different – a possibility not afforded in the same way by time. Put even more simply, we know that things are one way in Edinburgh but are another way in Oslo, or Chennai.

As an academic geographer, my research has generally focused on archives that need to be visited. Clearly, I am privileged in being able to visit archives, but it is always a little disappointing to find that an archive has been digitized when one of the greatest pleasures was to travel and visit real places, don white archive gloves, and explore the past with the assistance of knowledgeable and caring library and special collections staff. Conferences and invited talks around the world have also been part of my life. An early example that had a big impact was a small workshop of geographers and anthropologists in Dubrovnik, Croatia. It was, perhaps, the first such event I was invited to, expenses paid. I sat overlooking the Mediterranean with fascinating scholars and reflected on how precisely that kind of experience made a life in academia, and as a geographer, such a privileged and rewarding one. Travelling, in other words, has been part of my self-conception as a scholar, along with teaching and writing. It was part of the rewards package.

One of the books I reread to help me write this one was Pico Iyer’s The Global Soul. Iyer and I are very different beings united by a seeming restlessness. His book recounts his search for something he could call home as a person without routes – or with different kinds of roots in India, the United States, England, and Japan. Iyer is a person of colour, I am not. Iyer comes from a cosmopolitan family and mine, ancestory.com tells me, is not. And yet there is something similar at work. While his book recounts a search for home, this book is a search for an idea - the idea of the local as it is pursued in different local contexts. While his book travels through spaces of the avowedly global, from an Olympic Games venue to a shopping mall and an airport, mine is a search for spaces where inhabitants are searching for some local essence.

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^[1] Quoted in Patrick W. Watson, “The World is Entering a “Localism” Era” Forbes January 4^th, 2017 https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickwwatson/2017/01/04/the-world-is-entering-a-localism-era/#45ce570b2d75

^[2] Roger Scruton, “Conservatism and the Environment” Conservative Home March 2013 https://www.roger-scruton.com/articles/281-conservatism-and-the-environment.

^[3] Alisa Dawn Smith and J. B. MacKinnon, The 100-mile diet : a year of local eating (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2007), 69.

^[4] Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin, Mutual aid, a factor of evolution (London: Allen Lane, 1972).

^[5] Karl Marx et al., The Communist manifesto, Penguin classics, (London: Penguin Classics, 2014).

^[6] Doreen Massey, For space (London: SAGE, 2005), 8.