B 5.2 Glocalization and new forms of landscape policies

[TERCUD]

"The hierarchical exercise of power was linked to the way information was transferred as long as traditional technologies dominated: to link two points on Earth, the only solution was to move up along a hierarchy of centres of information treatment and transfer, until the point where a similar descending chain opened the possibility to reach the correspondent. This meant that the quantity and quality of information people received was all the better the higher they were placed in the communication structure – in a big city, the capital. Political organizations had the same basic structure. Their head benefited from the best access to all news: it was a fundamental element of their power.
The new information technologies offer new possibilities: from any point, rapid communication is avaiable with any other location on Earth without filtering effects. Glocalization offers all places the same advantages. This means that populations everywhere may receive the same news and acquire the same forms of knowledge. Capital cities and big metropolises, and the power systems they still harbour, lost one of the advantages they enjoyed in the past.
In such a context, it becomes difficult to enforce regulations upon reluctant populations. It is more economical and efficient to cooperate with them. Hence the new orientations taken by all policies: (i) they are increasingly based on cooperation and rely less on legal enforcement than in the past – as shown by the growing concern for governance; (ii) in order to economically modify the behaviour of private actors, they increasingly mobilize all forms of communication to transform citizens’ attitudes."

(This is an excerpt from the text by Professor Paul Claval “THE IDEA OF LANDSCAPE”)