Reconsidering Localism

Simin Davoudi, Ali Madanipour

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317818144
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architektur
• Subtopic: Stadtplanung & Landschaftsgestaltung

"Localism" has been deployed in recent debates over planning law as an anodyne, grassroots way to shape communities into sustainable, human-scale neighborhoods. But "local" is a moving category, with contradictory, nuanced dimensions. Reconsidering Localism brings together new scholarship from leading academics in Europe and North America to develop a theoretically-grounded critique and definition of the new localism, and how it has come to shape urban governance and urban planning.

Moving beyond the UK, this book examines localism and similar shifts in planning policy throughout Europe, and features essays on localism and place-making, sustainability, social cohesion, and citizen participation in community institutions. It explores how debates over localism and citizen control play out at the neighborhood, institutional and city level, and has come to effect the urban landscape throughout Europe. Reconsidering Localism is a current, vital addition to planning scholarship.

1 Introduction

Simin Davoudi and Ali Madanipour

DOI: 10.4324/9781315818863-1

I have three very clear priorities: localism, and we’ll weave that into everything we do from parks to finance to policy. My second priority is localism, and my third is … localism. (Eric Pickles, Minister for Communities and Local Government, June 2010)

The above statement is an indication of how localism was propelled into the limelight of British politics after the 2010 election when a coalition of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats came into office and made it their mantra. Their emphasis on localism reflects what has become a zeitgeist where ‘we are all localist now’ (Walker, 2002). The popularity of the term is shared across the political spectrum. Indeed, it was the newfound salience of localism in British politics that provided the original impetus for this book because, despite its ‘feel good’ factor, localism evokes multiple and contested meanings. Localism is seen as: a re-ordering and liberalisation of political spaces, a site of empowerment, a locus of knowledge generation, a framework for social integration and community-building, a localisation of economic activities and a site of resistance and environmental activism. The motivations for localism range from communitarian intents to liberal and libertarian agendas and are riddled with tensions between progressive and regressive potentials.

Localism also means different things in different domains. From an economic perspective, it is seen as a localisation process, reversing ‘the trend of globalisation by discriminating in favour of the local’ (2000: 27); a process that nurtures locally owned businesses, using local resources, employing local workers and serving local consumers (Shuman, Hines, 2000: 6). Its normative focus is on how to enable tighter, more visible and proximate relationships between producers and consumers as a way of strengthening endogenous growth. Thus, in the age of globalisation, localism can be seen as signifying the opposite of the global.

From a political perspective, localism denotes the decentralised and grass-roots forms of power. It is often used in the context of subsidiarity, devolution and decentralisation of the state’s powers, activities and responsibilities downwards to local governments and sideways to the market and civil society. Localism is often equated with democratisation and as such is one of the most frequently rehearsed rationales for decentralisation and for making the state accountable to people. The local is, therefore, portrayed as the site of resistance and empowerment of civil societies. It is the political perspective that underpins the elevation of localism in the British political landscape, as is reflected in the following statement:

There’s the efficiency argument that in huge hierarchies, money gets spent on bureaucracy instead of the frontline. There is the fairness argument that centralised national blueprints don’t allow for local solutions to major social problems. And there is the political argument that centralisation creates a distance in our democracy between the government and the governed. (HM Government, 2010: 4)

From a social perspective, localism conjures up images of the community, which itself is a contested concept with multiple meanings. Some see the community as an object, while others consider it as a process. The structural functionalist approaches of the 1960s (as in the Chicago School) conceptualised the community as an ‘organic whole’ contained in a small geographical unit; a kind of a refuge from anonymity and alienation. The more recent post-structural approaches conceptualise the community as being diverse and fragmented with no necessary ties to location. Instead, emphasis is put on symbolic and discursive meanings of the community, and on values and interests as the bases for its formation (Walkerdine and Studdert, n.d.). Does localism challenge this shift of emphasis from place-based to interest-based communities? Or is it premised on the assumption that there is a close affinity between the bonds of culture and the ties of locality and that both are necessary conditions of a collective life?

From a spatial perspective, localism often refers to small geographical scales down to neighbourhoods. Some see it as a lower tier of a neatly nested hierarchy of global, national, regional levels; what Marston (2000) calls a Russian-doll view of scale. Others consider the local not as a fixed spatial unit but as a fluid, relational space that is socially (re)produced. They argue that to consider any one scale as a priori preferable to another is to fall into a scale trap (Purcell, 2006). From an environmental perspective, localism is seen as a path to sustainability. Some argue that downscaling activities and local self-sufficiency is seen as necessary for reversing the ecological crisis. Others question the ability of local sustainability actions in bringing about systemic change; that environmental problems are global problems requiring global action.

The book examines the notion of localism and its multiple meanings in the economic, social, political and environmental domains and highlights the tensions that arise from the localism agenda. It brings together contributions from leading academics in Europe and North America to provide an expansive understanding of ‘localism’. The aim is to develop a theoretically grounded critique of the concept of localism and its articulation in the debates about: governance, democracy, citizen participation, place-making, social cohesion, civic capacity and sustainability transition. Attention is paid to both progressive and regressive potentials of localism and how these are played out in different contexts ranging from small neighbourhoods to contested cities and global ecologies, with examples from Britain as well as North America and Europe.

The book is organised in three parts and 14 chapters. After this introduction, Part I engages with different meanings of localism and its contested interpretations in diverse political contexts. Part II focuses on the relationship between localism and democracy and investigates whether localism can offer a promising prospect for the renewal of progressive politics. Part III addresses the relationship between localism and sustainability, raising the question as to whether and how the shift of attention to the local can address the global environmental crisis.

The four chapters in Part I critically engage with the theory and practice of localism and how it is understood in the context of political and social theories and played out in different contexts ranging from small neighbourhoods to divided cities and in the wider European debate on social cohesion. Chapter 2 analyses the concept of localism and its multiple meanings, with the aim of providing a theoretical understanding of the concept. It argues that the meaning of localism lies at an institutional–territorial–representational nexus with its own contested and continually changing ontologies, identities and boundaries. This nexus is formed by the different territorial and institutional arrangements that shape localities and by continually shifting intersection of different perspectives about the specificity and autonomy of a locality. From one perspective, which may be characterised as the view from within, localism is interpreted as a bid for autonomy, a form of resistance to the pressures from the outside, against the forces that try to integrate a locality into larger political units, economic processes and cultural identities. From another perspective, the view from the outside and from a more general standpoint, localism is seen as an attempt at efficiency exerted and encouraged by the higher levels of authority, which may demand openness and integration, while interpreting any form of resistance as fragmentary and regressive. The chapter argues for going beyond this dichotomy and analyses the local and localism at the intersection of institutions, territories and representations.

In Chapter 3, Frank Gaffikin engages with the paradox of localism in contested societies, drawing on the experiences of Northern Ireland. Localism proclaims the virtue of subsidiarity, and extols the ingenuity generated by home-grown resilience. However, he argues that whatever its democratic and entrepreneurial credentials in ‘normal’ urban conditions, the policy has less traction in ‘contested’ cities, where community is a much more exclusive concept. The chapter shows that in a context of deep division and pronounced spatial segregation, the primary objective of much neighbourhood activism can be to protect territory against the incursion of the alien ‘other’. Thus, localism amid such separatist politics contains a central paradox: though professing a restorative potential, it can inadvertently accentuate rather than ameliorate the contest. Since contested cities are often crucibles for the bigger issue that they reflect (such as race, or ethno-nationalist belonging), when focus is placed on micro-spaces within them, the imprint of the macro quarrel is often acutely visible. Gaffikin, therefore, explores the ramification of this paradox for creating shared space, and for the capacity to twin the processes of regeneration and reconciliation that is crucial to the creation of peaceful and sustainable places. He concludes with an outline of how agonistic forms of collaboration that embrace wider socio-spatial constituencies can overcome the deficiencies of a narrow localism.

Through the example of Denver, Colorado, in Chapter 4 Susan Clarke analyses the political opportunities that localism may bring about. She argues that the recent entrepreneurial leveraging strategy in the city has retained a place-based focus, although one targeting the economic fabric at the neighbourhood level rather than a more holistic regeneration approach. As a result, leveraged investments are targeted in a smaller number of neighbourhoods than in traditional distribution strategies: neighbourhoods are being systematically carved up into districts that better serve the policy emphasis on their roles as investment sites. She argues that Denver’s trajectory illustrates a shift from the ‘politics of distribution’ centred on distribution of public resources to the ‘politics of construction’ where assembling rather than directing resources is the key public role. Drawing on the post-political cities concept Clarke analyses the trajectory of neighbourhood regeneration policies in Denver between 1980 and 2012 and examines whether there is an emergent post-political landscape in Denver, one in which neighbourhood regeneration is de-politicised and removed from political debate. The chapter puts the Denver case in the context of neighbourhood policies in other American cities and considers the ways in which neighbourhood policies reflect a particular understanding of localism in the American context.

Chapter 5 presents a Foucauldian interpretation of localism, arguing that the emerging top-down localism in the UK is the spatial manifestation of ‘post-social’ technologies of neoliberal governmentality that began with the introduction of ‘the community’ a few decades ago. It suggests that localism re-imagines the local as ‘the natural’ geography of ‘the community’, which itself is seen as the ‘natural’ articulation of collective life. Governing through ‘the local’ involves freeing localities to become responsible for their own fates and bear the consequences of their own conducts, yet in such a way that their action is aligned with governmental ends. The chapter aims to demonstrate how the local is made both the target of governmental action and the voluntary partner of government, through a complex process of identification and responsibilisation, and how this process is enabled and regulated at a distance through technocratic and calculative technologies of agency and performance.

Part II of the book focuses on the progressive potentials of localism for developing civic capacity, shaping places and enhancing local knowledge exchanges. In Chapter 6, drawing on her engagement with practices of local planning and neighbourhood regeneration in the UK, Patsy Healey positions the concept of localism within the wider context of a search for more progressive approaches to place governance in complex, pluralistic and conflicted Western democracies. She centres the discussion on developing a civic capacity to promote integrated, richly informed and pluralistic conceptions of place qualities and connectivities, as these are evolving into the future. Healey argues that this requires recognition of the often deep conflicts that divide communities over current issues and future pathways, and that the challenge of place governance provides one of the key arenas within which the qualities of democratic systems are being tested at the present time. In this context, she discusses the hopes and dangers of the ‘localist’ agenda, and identifies its more progressive directions that can be cultivated in the micro-practices at multiple levels.

In Chapter 7, Hendrik Wagenaar and Jurgen van der Heijden draw on the experience of the Netherlands to describe a new generation of social economy initiatives that they call civic enterprises. They suggest that civic enterprise is distinguishable from the social economy as it has been practised, studied, made the object of government policies and invested with hope, by government officials and academic promoters for over two decades. This is because civic enterprises contain considerable economic and democratic potential that rests on the close association of the economic and democratic benefits of civic enterprise because social production and civic enterprise produce social goods in a democratic non-hierarchical, non-profit way that form an alternative to the traditional social production system of democratic capitalism, in which large centralised firms provide mass-produced goods to consumers with little or no voice in the production system. They also argue that since the early 1970s the market economy has eroded the quality of representative democracy in Western nations and threatens basic civic freedoms and social values. Social production and civic enterprise both operate on different principles that include associative democracy and informality. They suggest, therefore, that social economy and civic enterprise open up a perspective on economic, social and democratic governance that forms a real alternative to the inherent shortcomings of democratic capitalism.

Chapter 8 is developed from a case study of the emerging practices of neighbourhood planning in England and its latent assumption that communities have the capacity to develop a plan that can gain statutory status. Susannah Gunn, Elizabeth Brooks and Geoff Vigar review the trajectory of English planning’s attempts to engage with communities and reflect on whether increased opportunity for empowerment is accompanied by communities’ capacity to take advantage of it. They introduce the idea of community capacity as an analytical tool and use it to reflect on a case study of one of the vanguard Neighbourhood Planning processes (Allendale) and the plan it produced. They conclude that a community as rich as Allendale, in terms of community capacity and a relatively straightforward well-protected planning context, is able to complete such a task with considerable help from a highly engaged local authority, but raise important questions as to whether other communities with more limited assets, more complex and pressured development contexts and less local authority support are likely to find it harder.

In Chapter 9, Paul Cowie and Simin Davoudi question the democratic legitimacy of neighbourhood planning, which is the most visible manifestation of localism in England. Following a review of the type and sources of legitimacy, they suggest that in order to judge the legitimacy of a given political authority (such as neighbourhood forums) the analysts need to move beyond both normative–descriptive dualism and procedural–substantive dualism and consider a broader framework that allows for a situated and contextualised assessment. Their proposed framework, therefore, considers both procedural/democratic and substantive/outcome sources of legitimacy. As regards the former, the framework broadens the concept of representation to include its multiple forms. As regards the latter, it focuses not on ideal notions of outcomes, but rather on the premises upon which outcomes are considered as beneficial or otherwise. They use this framework, of contextualised and relational understanding of legitimacy, to examine the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgement
• 1 Introduction
• PART I: THE LOCAL IN LOCALISM
• PART II: LOCALISM AND DEMOCRACY
• PART III: LOCALISM AND SUSTAINABILITY
• Index