Local Distinctiveness

Losing Your Place : Local

Scale is important, as is the question of who defines it. We are talking of a fineness of grain - the neighbourhood, the locality, the parish, the housing estate, the high street, the village, the suburb, perhaps even the street as defined by those who live and work and play there. The area to which people feel they belong, and which belongs to them through familiarity, or which they have chosen and are claiming anew.

It is not regional diversity but local distinctiveness. The bigger the scale the more reduced the sensitivity and the easier it becomes to steamroller strategies for the 'greater good' which prescribe the same solutions to subtly different circumstances encouraging convergence and homogeneity... thereby missing the whole point.

When we change scale we think and behave differently : nations are abstractions, regions are generally defined from the outside in, they are about form and function, they are academic, institutional or political creations.

Locality needs to be defined from the inside, with a cultural and natural base, less abstraction, more detail.

Attempts should not be made to reduce local distinctiveness to an essence. It is a compound thing and a messy one as well as being dynamic hence its elusiveness. It cannot be summarised. It may be variegated within, but have a unity and integrity in the mingling of its parts. Smallness should not be confused with simplicity.

Returning to the Chaos theorists, Mandelbrot asked 'How long is the coast of Britain?' (following LF Richardson). It seems so simple, but he recognized and asserted that any answer would be dependent upon the distance from which one was taking the measurement. Someone measuring a satellite map would give a much smaller figure than someone walking every inlet, and for a snail every pebble would add to the length. It is dependent upon the scale at which one sets the dividers/ruler to work. In other words it all depends.

While we have made the world smaller with aeroplanes and trains and cars, travellators and elevators, we still have to pace most of our activities to our size and to our own walking. It is at this scale and speed that we see and savour most. At the greater scales we can understand patterns in a different way, but to act at this level risks inattention to people and the quotidian. Substitution of abstract words begins to desensitise - the public for people, sites for streets or fields, environment for places, natural resources for woods and clear streams: abstractions which disengage us from reality, and give professionals a mandate to act without care for the detail.

Losing Your Place
Distinctiveness
Detail
Authenticity
Particularity
Patina
References

 Download this essay as a word document