The Heart of the Place: The Resurrection of Locality in an Age of Hyperspace

The focus, orientation and institutional organization of urban and regional policies in advanced capitalist countries has fundamentally changed over the last 15 years. The nature of these institutional and substantive transformations will be explored in the wider context of global economic and regulatory/institutional restructurations.In the paper, it is argued that the downing of the era of Fordist consensus and the subsequent disjointed efforts to reconstruct a new sense of economic and institutional coherence is not only accompanied by a new ideological rhetoric but, more importantly, by radically new forms of organisation of the global political-economic fabric.The resulting growing contradiction between historically produced and relatively fixed local structures in the context of the versatile hyperspace of flexible accumulation redefines the place of the locality. New spaces of production and consumption as well as radically altered spatial politics emerge out of the womb of this global/local interference.The challenges posed by these transformations lead to the resurrection of the locality and of local politics in a context of declining discretionary powers of the nation-state. It will be concluded that this resurrection of locality and of new forms of territorial policies coincide with a shift in the command over space to the corporate headquarters of financial and industrial corporations. This shift, in turn, calls for a reconsideration of the politics of place.