Localism Quotes

Rather than equating the terms 'local' and 'cosmopolitan' with geographical areas (rural and urban respectively), sociologist Wade Clark Roof suggests that these terms refer to character types who can be found in a diversity of settings in the United States. Locals are strongly oriented toward community or neighborhood, favor commitments to primary groups (family, neighborhood, fraternal and community organizations), tend to personalize their interpretations of social experience, and are more traditional in their beliefs and values. Cosmopolitans, on the other hand, are oriented toward the world outside the residential community, prefer membership in professional or special interest organizations, and are more open to social change and more tolerant of diversity in belief than locals. While a disproportionate number of locals are found in smaller communities, studies indicate that other factors - such as length of residence in a community, age, and educational level - play an even stronger role in determining orientation.

Leonora Tubbs Tisdale

Civic imagination and innovation and creativity are emerging from local ecosystems now and radiating outward, and this great innovation, this great wave of localism that's now arriving, and you see it in how people eat and work and share and buy and move and live their everyday lives, this isn't some precious parochialism, this isn't some retreat into insularity, no. This is emergent. The localism of our time is networked powerfully. And so, for instance, consider the ways that strategies for making cities more bike-friendly have spread so rapidly from Copenhagen to New York to Austin to Boston to Seattle. Think about how experiments in participatory budgeting, where everyday citizens get a chance to allocate and decide upon the allocation of city funds. Those experiments have spread from Porto Alegre, Brazil to here in New York City, to the wards of Chicago. Migrant workers from Rome to Los Angeles and many cities between are now organizing to stage strikes to remind the people who live in their cities what a day without immigrants would look like. In China, all across that country, members of the New Citizens' Movement are beginning to activate and organize to fight official corruption and graft, and they're drawing the ire of officials there, but they're also drawing the attention of anti-corruption activists all around the world. In Seattle, where I'm from, we've become part of a great global array of cities that are now working together bypassing government altogether, national government altogether, in order to try to meet the carbon reduction goals of the Kyoto Protocol. All of these citizens, united, are forming a web, a great archipelago of power that allows us to bypass brokenness and monopolies of control.

Eric Liu

Localisation stands, at best, at the limits of practical possibility, but it has the decisive argument in its favour that there will be no alternative.