The lure of the local: landscape studies at the end of a troubled century

‘Our streets! Our world!’ So answered the amazing coalition of activists – labor, environmental, peace and justice, anti-genetically modified food, health, housing – gathered in Seattle in the waning weeks of the twentieth century to protest the (not-so-new) world order under construction by the World Trade Organization. Facing down tear gas and rubber bullets, no less than the condescending pronouncements of such tribunes of the global ruling class as The Economist or the The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman, activists were making a remarkable, and remarkably sophisticated, argument about the nature of ‘globalization’. So-called ‘free trade,’ they were saying, was a shibboleth for cementing elite control over the spaces of our lives, from city streets to nation-states, from the dinner table to the circuits of capital that span the globe. In response ‘Our streets! Our world!’ stood as a stark recognition that democratic control had to be actively grabbed and staunchly defended, but doing so would only be possible if democratic control of the streets of Seattle (or Dakar or Jakarta) was linked to democratic control over the globe itself – the patterns and reasons for trade, the parceling out of the burdens such trade inevitably brings with it, and the purposes behind the production and consumption of goods. This activist linking of the local to the global (and back again), while clearly a response to linkages already wrought on behalf of global capital, marks a significant advance over the old slogan of the 1970s: Progress in Human Geography 25,2 (2001) pp. 269–281