Glocalization - The Globalization of the Local Community

Modern Industrial societies are characterized by identities qualified by linguistic territory manifest in terms of the nation-state. Post-Modern cultures, as they emerge today increasingly dissolve National identities for new territories in the manner of regional boundaries. In the past 50 years, European nation-states have become united as the EU and North America is increasingly recognized as an Economic union under NAFTA. These regional and emergent Global identities are significantly characterized by integrated systems of financial exchange and International trade representing the effects upon the new scale of community shaped by global communications. But these communications are qualified by being instantaneous and consequently embrace the planet as a simultaneous field of discourse. The local and the global are therefore inextricably related, while the formal cause for a new sense of space and community is the infrastructure of information technology software and networking. The planet, as a resonant electronic field has altered human sensibilities, both local and global. This paper will discuss emerging features, shaping both form and space-conceptions in architecture and urbanism which are not conceived in terms of the relationships of form and function, but rather, in the emerging context of digital imaging and networking; for example, features intrinsic to the developing interactive space of the commercial street and also new sources of alienation in the community induced by the virtual reality of cyberspace. The work of media theorists Jean Baudrillard and Marshall McLuhan will be applied to explore the emergent identity of intelligent space in the Global village, where we are increasingly witnessing the effective interface between the local and global. Shared concepts in these works would involve the ideas of nostalgia as cultural retrieval, memory and the symbolic/iconic dimension of virtual images that constitute an essential dimension of social experience in cyberspace.

Volume Editors
Ikhlas Sabouni & Jorge Vanegas