"Where do you want to go today?" was the Microsoft slogan repeated ad infinitum in the late 1990s. It was a tantalizing but empty promise. The answer of course - obvious to all but the most naive of viewers - is that we are to go no further and do no more than to shuffle to our computer stations. At a time when it seemed that the world was becoming interconnected like never before, in a real and physical sense its people were in fact becoming much less so.
In the protests of recent years, globalism has become associated with negative corporate values such as exploitation of labour in sweatshops in underdeveloped countries, monopolizing, homogenizing Hollywood and other American business, while localism retained the dignity and the moral high ground. Partly as a result of this skewered relationship between the global and local, travel had begun to lose its allure - even to become something reprehensible. "Tourist" had become a term of disdain while "locals" held a place of esteem, as beleaguered victims of tourism. Air travel had declined significantly long before the events of September 11th, 2001.
It is time to reconsider the relative value of local versus global and tourist versus resident. No Local is not a manifesto, nor is it a slogan or a logo. It is simply a travel guide whose primary recommendation is that we should travel - and much more than we do now. Feature articles will soon be cropping up under the No Local category. Topics to be covered include several, non-nostalgic, brief tours through Europe, plus Japan at 500km/hour (not averse to grabbing a Starbucks coffee in Tokyo, but making sure to try the sea urchin as well), urban New Zealand plus vineyards, a 15 day all Asia trip, summer skiing and touring in Chile and "2 hours in..." - a series of articles with succinct suggestions to make a meaningful experience of business or other very short term visits to interesting cities around the world. No Local represents, or at least recognizes, a new form of travel - an experience which takes advantage of the benefits which communications and transportation advancements have long offered.
It may seem like the world is shrinking, but it isn't really. People who say it is a small world don't get out enough. If you use a 60s trace-o-matic game to chart the daily travels of the most people, you would discover that the vast majority exist almost exclusively within a region 10-15km in diameter, with one or possibly two annual trips outside of their comfort zone. A personal groundhog day of travel from home to office to home, repeated many millions of times all over the globe, in spite of the fact that technology has supposedly rendered the traditional office obsolete.
Why hasn't there been an explosion of travel? Flying has never been cheaper in real dollars and the reasons to visit are as great as ever. Many kinds of work are not dependent upon constant face-to-face contact - so there should also be a much more flexible and varied definition and experience of work. With mobile phones, laptops and faxing readily available in much of the globe, an employee's location should be irrelevant. I am rarely within 1,000 km of my editors and clients - an arrangement which works perfectly well for all. Yet, forced to work within conventional business models, many have little opportunity to travel, planes fly half empty and many airlines are in dire trouble.
No Local considers a different kind of travel than that which is usually represented in the travel section of the newspaper or glossy magazines. The idea of "armchair travel" is anathema. It is not about backpackers or jet setters, or sun-seekers or culture crawlers - nor about businessmen with titanium laptops and satellite phones - rather it is about travel as an essential part of a person's life. No matter how eager the travel agent, travel brochure and the editor of the travel publication are to have you see travel as a form of escapism, it can also been seen, quite simply as a part of life - and everyday life at that.
Discount airlines such as Easy Jet, Air Asia, Jet Blue and several others have made air travel available for the cost of lunch. Now Barcelona is virtually a suburb of Berlin, Singapore is a suburb of Kuala Lumpur and New York a suburb of Seattle. One No Local article details my recent trip around Europe - 17 cities in 30 days - mostly on discount airlines costing an average of €50 per flight.
Though the title is inspired by the anti-globalization bible "No Logo" - No Local is not specifically a critique of that book. There are, however, many elements of the anti-globalization movement that are deserving of critique. At the slogan level, the most troubling perhaps is "think globally, act locally" which has it exactly the wrong way around. Most people need no encouragement to focus on their own small worlds - which can be very small indeed. But thinking and acting on a global scale is something which continues to elude us.
Why is that? While most of us have an opinion on what should be done about Iraq, very few of us in the west have any direct experience with the country and its people. Personally, I only know one person who has even been to Iraq and he is a war correspondent. This is not to be misconstrued as an endorsement of any given regime or political position, but a suggestion that we do our own research. Recent laughably biased media accounts (CNN and Fox-TV in particular) from the region only serve to make skepticism and self-discovery more appropriate. Although of course, there is an element of naiveté in the suggestion, we should travel in part as informal weapons inspectors, meeting the local population and exchanging views.
There can be no better poster boy for the No Local movement than the famously untravelled U.S. President Bush. As the son of a president, he had only left the United States once prior to assuming the office sometimes referred to as "the leader of the free world". Just take a moment to ponder this - leading a world he's never even seen.... On top of that there is the often mentioned statistic that only 20% of Americans even hold a passport.
And now many suggest that North Korea is next in the hot seat - with potentially disastrous consequences. But what exactly do we know about North Korea? Although the country can be visited on a simple travel visa, according to North Korean government officials, fewer than five hundred western tourists visit North Korea each year.
In addition to writing about travel, I write on architecture and design. In my work, I find myself frequently visiting the world's most prestigious firms and have developed many friendships within these offices. These are firms which are designing major public buildings all over the world - in some cases they are designing the cities themselves. What I find most astonishing about these environments - and what they all seem to have in common - is the insular nature of the work and the antiquated business models they employ. Which from my perspective seem to be to hire the most talented and intelligent graduates from the top schools in the world, then virtually imprison them for the next five to ten years, retaining ownership of all their ideas and research - an intellectual sweat shop of the first degree.
Most employees complain, off the record, of incredible workloads - typically at least 70 hours/week, sometimes considerably more. And it occurs to me to ask - as someone who visits over twenty cities each year - what exactly do these people actually know about cities - or about anything first hand for that matter? They rarely see their spouses, let alone the world. And yet for some reason the model remains stubbornly persistent - clients presumably want to see a big, impressive office in the centre of town. As a result they tend to purchase the services of firms which experience the globe as seen from one fixed point on it. The more things change, the more things stay the same.
But how much more compelling would be a model which allows fifty or more intelligent, engaged employees to work on the same issues from fifty different places around the globe - or better still, in transit - pulling unique sources and establishing connections from the disparate experiences which would inevitably exist. What is stopping this from occurring? Will someone please explain it to me?
There seems a pronounced resistance, in some quarters, to the very idea of people straying from their assigned localities. I attended a symposium on mobility in London recently - expecting, for once, to be in the company of like-minded, laterally, if not upwardly, mobile people. It honestly hadn't occurred to me that mobility could be seen in anything but positive terms. I found instead that the consensus of understanding at this conference was that leisure travel is frequently disruptive to local populations and with little intellectual merit (we have the Internet after all) and therefore should be limited by whatever means possible. The bureaucrats who had engineered London's generally positive and successful "congestion tax" - effectively reducing car travel to the centre of the city - were on hand to discuss ways to restrict travel throughout Europe.
On another research trip, I found myself touring the iconic United Nations buildings in New York. A poignant reminder of the utopian spirit of international cooperation and global awareness of the post-world war II era. But as I toured the buildings, what struck me is the terrible disrepair into which they have fallen.
It is difficult to imagine a more dramatic symbol of the current tragic state of international cooperation and shared purpose than in the peeling ceiling paint, badly worn and stained carpets and cracking, splintered wood work of the once magnificent U.N. buildings. No state legislature or city hall in the US would be allowed to slide into such shabby state of neglect. In fact, "the world government" as the UN was once optimistically called, is operating out of what looks like a low rent apartment building.
Time to ignore locally and live globally. Or to paraphrase another counter-cultural slogan - log off, turn off and go out.
don't even go there - do government travel warnings play into the hands of terrorists?
