Scale Matters: Local Interventions Towards Global Change
Posted on December 6, 2016For anyone living in 2016, it is more than apparent that the world is in urgent need of radical change. It is distressing to see that despite the energetic protests, resistance movements and constant struggles to improve social and political structures, things appear to remain the same. Everyday we not only witness, but also take part in numerous individual and collective efforts that attempt to break the status quo, despite the smallness of these battles in the face of the larger scheme of things. A global transformation feels imminent, but with so much failure around, we often feel frustrated, lost and powerless within the complexity of a world driven by political and economic interests that are not easy to grasp. Oftentimes we are unsure if any of our actions can have the impact we so deeply long for. But, paradoxically, in this context we also become inclined to think that immediate and small scale actions are the way to achieve change because they offer tangible and direct results. Although it is clear that all change starts from the local, our view cannot remain at that level because it is apparent that small actions, although deeply important, are no longer enough. There is no doubt that beginning from the local is fundamental but we can not afford to look only at the pieces, we have to see the whole; the age that we are living in demands us to think in terms of imagining and building desirable versions of the future for all of humanity.
How can we, as designers, intervene locally in a way that that our projects and interventions align towards a larger, global, and long-term transformation? We need to be able to understand the complexity of the political context in which we live so to use our practice as a tool that transforms the entangled power structures that shape our cultural, educational and economic production systems. In their book, Inventing the Future, Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek extensively discuss the various reasons that undergird the failures of energetic social-change movements in our times, such as Occupy Wall Street or the M15 in Spain, which fizzled out without achieving any meaningful and long-lasting change. They argue that the main problem lies within the assumptions that shape the strategic horizon of the contemporary left, which they define as ‘folk politics’. This term refers to a collective and historically constructed political common sense which is no longer relevant in engaging with and critiquing with the evolved mechanisms of capitalist power in this day and age, or offering any concrete alternatives. Against the abstraction and and inhumanity of capitalism, folk politics aims to bring politics down to the human scale by emphasising temporal, spatial and conceptual immediacy. Folk politics is the basic intuition that immediacy is always better and often more authentic [1] . The problem with folk political thinking is not that it starts from the local, but that it remains and even privileges that level. Localism attempts to reduce large scale systemic problems to the more manageable sphere of the local community; it effectively denies the systemically interconnected nature of today’s world [2] . We need to think of projects that are scalable beyond our immediate communities; we need them to be aware of the global nature of neoliberal capitalism while also being sensitive to localized nuances. Factors such as scale and extension need to be considered in our interventions and perhaps most importantly, design needs to move away from a responsive, parochial position, and initiate actions that are scalable!
Jenny Holzer, Selection from Truisms 1977-79
[1] Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future (London, New York: Verso, 2015), 12
[2] Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future (London, New York: Verso, 2015), 17
-Gabriela López Dena