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Homelessness versus aggression ?
click on images for full-size:
The universal city the same everywhere (view from Victoria Peak in Hong Kong)
Particularlty gone savage (Holocaust sculpture in the Old Synagogue in Krakow, Poland)
Today we seem to confront both a global leveling of our identities and places, and a sometimes confident, sometimes frantic reassertion of local identities. We seem to be caught between a heartless universal offering a rootless freedom, and an resentful locality asserting the rights of blood and soil. Or perhaps what appear as strong localities are really papier-mache opposition figures encouraged by the global market in order to to accelerate its own operations? These options seem bleak: either we live the homeless and homogenizing universal, playing a sham locality, or we are helplessly local and attacked by global forces. This way of framing our situation hesitates between two descriptions, but both envision only single-ply inhabitation. We should respond that we are mixes of global and local. But if we are, how are we not torn apart in the mixture? What kind of combination would this mixture be?