After reading the attached article entitled “Conscious Identity: Going Local in America in a Global Age,” write a 2-3 double-spaced page (500-750 words) using the following prompts/questions as a guide. ) Please complete the answer sheet. If you decide to quote something from your essay, be sure to include the page number in parentheses within your essay (in-text citation). If you publish something from elsewhere, be sure to include the full citation.

1. What is neolocalism? What was the driving force behind neolocalism? How did it appear?
2. After reading the author’s examples in the article, choose an example from your own life or experience that you think fits into the category of neolocalism. Which local perspective does your example fit into? (These observations can be found on pages 66-71)
3. Do you agree with the author that your example can “broaden horizons” as the author describes it?

Deliberate identities: becoming local in America in a global age
Steven M. Schnell*
Department of Geography, Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, USA
As the world becomes increasingly interlinked through the processes
of globalization, many have argued that geography as a basis for
identity is losing its resonance. However, the potentially homogenizing effects of globalization and corporatization have, in turn, spawned
a notable move in the opposite direction in the United States. James
‘‘Pete’’ Shortridge has referred to this move as neolocalism, the
conscious attempt of individuals and groups to establish, rebuild, and
cultivate local ties and identities. The word ‘‘local’’ has, as a result,
taken on renewed vigor over the past two decades, as it is actively
embraced as a counter to globalism. But what does it mean, and how
is it used? Because it is consciously cultivated, this idea of identity
becomes much more than a statement of ‘‘who I am’’; it becomes a
broader political, social, and economic undertaking. This paper
examines a wide variety of manifestations of neolocal identity
building such as microbreweries, local food movements, and the local
living economy movement, and argues that a distinctive American
geography of neolocalism exists.
Keywords: local; local economies; neolocalism; local food; James
‘‘Pete’’ Shortridge
The resurgence of place
Globalization has, without a doubt, changed our relationship to place. As
the speed of communication, travel, and movement of goods increases, the
power of space and place to bind our actions is loosened (Harvey 1989).
Technology seemingly creates the space for placeless communities, formed
more by common interests, bonds, and demographics than by place.
Aided and abetted by globalization (or at least the more homogenizing
impacts of the form of globalization dominated by large corporations),
such changes have led many to argue that geography as a basis for identity
has lost its importance. Although space may have been obliterated (at least
for those of us in the wealthy, privileged and wired neighborhoods of the
global village (DeBlij 2009)), the particularities of place have not been so
*Steven M. Schnell is Professor of Geography at Kutztown University, 105
Graduate Center, Kutztown, PA 19530, USA. Phone: (610) 683-1595. Email:
schnell@kutztown.edu
Journal of Cultural Geography, 2013
Vol. 30, No. 1, 55
89, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08873631.2012.745984

2013 JCG Press, Oklahoma State University

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easily relegated to the dustbin. These potentially homogenizing effects of
globalization, corporatization, and connectivity have, in fact, spawned a
notable move in the opposite direction over the past twenty-five years.
Many people have actively sought a new sense of place, a new attachment
to where they are.
James ‘‘Pete’’ Shortridge has referred to this move as neolocalism, the
conscious attempt of individuals and groups to establish, rebuild, and
cultivate local ties, local identities, and increasingly, local economies. As
Shortridge has argued, people seek out ‘‘regional lore and local attachment’’ in reaction to the destruction of more traditional bonds to
community because, as he put it, ‘‘we are feeling a need to forge better
geographical identities’’ (1996, p. 10)1
. In the years since Shortridge first
made this observation, such attempts to re-root have gone far beyond a
vague sense of regional attachment, and evolved into an interlinked series
of movements to create more local economies and local identities,
movements that are beginning to combine their efforts across the country
in mutual support of place.
This article is an exploration of some of the ways that people have
been attempting to recapture, or to create, ‘‘localness’’ as a way of life. It is
not an in-depth analysis of any one item; I have explored a number of the
individual phenomena discussed here elsewhere in more depth. Instead, it
is an effort to examine the commonalities in motivations as well as the
nature of the simultaneous rapid expansion in entities as diverse as
microbreweries, watershed organizations, local living economies movements, community supported agriculture, and numerous other manifestations of the self-conscious return to localness. I analyze some of the
diverse cultural meanings encoded in the word ‘‘local’’ as used by such
movements by examining promotional materials used by the many
different enterprises covered in the article. I then conclude with an
analysis of the geography of neolocalism, as well as an evaluation of the
potential of the movement to transform economic and social relations,
and to reshape place identity in a globalizing age.
Manifestations of neolocalism2
What exactly is ‘‘new’’ about neolocalism? For most of human history,
people lived local lives by defaulteating foods produced near them, following local cultural traditions, and using local building patterns. But with the onset of modernity, the rise of industrialism, and the advent of ever-improving communications and travel technology, such place-based ties were no longer a given. People had optionseconomic, cultural, and
socialthat no longer required local ties. What makes neolocalism different from local ties in the past is its selfconscious aspect. It is the result of people cultivating local ties by choice, not by necessity (Zelinsky 2011). Although we can dissolve the bonds of 56 S.M. Schnell Downloaded by [New York University] at 10:06 12 February 2016 place, it is increasingly clear that people do not necessarily want to. Place remains a vital part of people’s identity, and when they become detached from place, many feel that something is missing: a sense of the local, a sense of belonging to a place, and a sense of that place as distinct from other places. Increasingly, they react by actively cultivating these ties
whether through the growth of the local foods movement, the flourishing
of self-consciously local enterprises such as microbreweries, or the rise of
the local living economies movement.3
An early harbinger of neolocalism was the explosion of microbreweries in the country in the 1980s and 1990s. The number of breweries has
expanded dramatically over the past twenty-five years, from 82 breweries
in the early 1980s to almost 1,600 today, during a time frame when per
capita alcohol consumption has generally declined (Flack 1997; NIAAA
2010; Real Beer, Inc. 2012). A major attraction of microbreweries is the
exclusive nature of their productlocal beers that are not found elsewhere, products that are tied to a unique place. Such breweries are often proudly and self-consciously local, and actively promote their brew through the use of idiosyncratically local beer names and imagery. In fact, microbreweries are marketing ‘‘place’’ as much as they are marketing beer, and they actively seek out distinctly local imagery, local landscapes, and local stories to position themselves as intrinsically rooted in place. Microbreweries are evidence that growing numbers of Americans feel a lack of local connections in their daily lives, and will embrace enterprises that promise reconnection with local economies, landscapes, history, and culture. The images used by brewers vary as widely as the places they inhabit. Local landscapes and wildlife are featured prominently in these promotions. So too do other aspects of a place’s personality, such as Bethlehem, Pennsylvania’s vanished steel-making past and its origin as a Moravian religious settlement (indicated by the star of Bethlehem); Moab, Utah’s status as national center of mountain biking and a gateway city to Arches National Park; and lobster, the signature food of Maine (Lewis 1989). The logo from New Glarus Brewing in Wisconsin, with its fingerprint-patterned map and exhortation to ‘‘Drink Indigenous,’’ makes the yearning for a connection between identity and unique places explicit (Figure 1).4 Brewers often go to great lengths to create a distinctly local theme, and the images that adorn their beer labels often get every bit as much attention as the names themselves. For example, in this image from the Free State Brewery, in Lawrence, Kansas, we see an image promoting the brewery’s John Brown Ale (Figure 2). John Brown, of course, was the famous/notorious anti-slavery crusader whose violent exploits, in Kansas and elsewhere, helped to spark the Civil War. Indeed, the name of the brewery itself derives from Lawrence’s status as a bastion of free-state anti-slavery advocates in the decades prior to the Journal of Cultural Geography 57 Downloaded by [New York University] at 10:06 12 February 2016 Civil War. The image itself is modeled on John Steuart Curry’s painting ‘‘Tragic Prelude,’’ which adorns the Kansas statehouse in Topeka. The forceful, and slightly crazed, appearance of Brown is presided over by a looming tornado, a reference to Kansas’ presence in Tornado Alley. Both images in turn take issue with the outsider’s common perception of Kansas as a mild place where not much happens. The resulting image is thus a multilayered distillation of Kansas uniqueness. Imagery need not be a point of pride evenonly of distinctivenessas can be seen in the Wasatch Ogden, Utah’s ‘‘Polygamy Porter’’ (Wasatch Brewery), or Cleveland’s ‘‘Burning River Pale Ale’’ (Great Lakes Brewing Company), a reference to the infamous 1969 Cuyahoga River fire (Figure 3). Figure 1. Distinctiveness of place, reflected in beer label imagery, from New Glarus, WI, Bethlehem, PA, and Portland, ME. 58 S.M. Schnell Downloaded by [New York University] at 10:06 12 February 2016 Local wineries too have expanded dramatically during this time period (Trubek 2008). Indeed, wine is even more explicitly based in place, through the idea of terroir, the integral connection between a place’s climate, soils, and the character of the grapes produced in those soils, a concept that has in recent years been applied to many other areas of food production as well (Trubek 2008). Winery tours are a de rigueur part of tourist advertising for most regions of the country, and are touted as a means of experiencing the ‘‘authentic’’ nature of a place (Schnell 2011). Breweries and wineries construct localness in different fashion, however. While wineries generally ascribe their rootedness to the very soil and climate their grapes are produced in (though some import grapes from elsewhere to carry out their craft), brewers usually draw their raw Figure 2. T-shirt image promoting John Brown Ale (Free State Brewery, Lawrence, KS), drenched in Kansas symbolism, drawing on John Steuart Curry’s famous mural, ‘‘Tragic Prelude,’’ which adorns the Kansas statehouse in Topeka. For an image of Curry’s original painting, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ File:John_Brown_Painting.JPG [accessed 10 September 2012]. Courtesy of Free State Brewing Company. Journal of Cultural Geography 59 Downloaded by [New York University] at 10:06 12 February 2016 ingredients from elsewhere; barley and especially hops, are grown in geographically concentrated areas, and hops are said to similarly gain a large part of their character from their terroir. Beer brewers thus rely on different means to evoke localness: the art of brewing itself, and the narratives of place they employ in their marketing. Microbreweries and wineries are far from the only arena where ferment of neolocalism has arisen. The local food movement has exploded in popularity and prominence over the past decade as local food customs, local food producers, and local cuisines are all increasingly emphasized as integral to the experience of place (Trubek 2008). The motives behind the local eating movement are diverseeating local is said to reduce fossil fuel
inputs into the food system, increase the diversity of food available
(through heirlooms and other, not-easily-transported varieties), keep
dollars spent on food local, and enhance the sense of community centered
on food. Equally important are the explicit ties to place that local eating
provides.
The local-eating movement has many facets. One has been the
growth of Community Supported Agriculture, or CSA, a setup where
people buy a share in a farm for an entire growing season, and often
Figure 3. Imagery need not be a point of pride, just distinctiveness. The Wasatch
Brewery specializes in names that tweak the dominant Mormon culture of their
area. Courtesy of Great Lakes Brewing Company and Utah Brewers Cooperative.
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participate directly in the life of the farmthrough volunteer days, potlucks, and seasonal festivals. Participants in CSA often state that they join specifically to become more directly connected with the farmers and the land that produce their food (Schnell 2007).5 In fact, the Japanese word for CSA, teikei, is often colloquially translated as ‘‘food with the farmer’s face on it’’ (Imhoff 1996, p. 430; Henderson and Van En 1999, p. xvi). The numbers of CSAs (which began in the United States in the mid-1980s) are expanding every year, and today there are at least 4,000 of them nationwide (RVE 2010; Local Harvest 2012). Many CSAs have lengthy waiting lists, also indicative of the growing demand. In my interviews with farmers and members of CSAs, one of the common reasons that both mention for participating is the desire to create more direct connections between customers and growers. CSAs attempt to achieve this through a variety of means: face-to-face interaction between farmers and members, farm visits, social events such as potlucks and harvest festivals, and even opportunities for members to take part in the harvest (and the weeding). There is an oft-cited figure (that, if anything, likely understates reality) that the average item of food travels 1,500 miles before it reaches your plate; CSA attempts to bring food closer to home.6 It also, in many cases, goes beyond that, as one farmer that I interviewed observed: ‘‘The growing popularity of CSAs, I think, shows a need in people’s minds for more connections with their food supply, with small family farms. And I think a certain amount of that is idealized …. But I think there’s also value in things beyond the food, and when a farm can offer that, can offer the sense of community, the events that bring people together, that’s valuable. Because I do feel that community is neglected, and people are searching for opportunities.’’ Farmers’ markets are another arena that has experienced a similar level of explosive growth (Brown 2001). They, like CSAs, promote direct connections between farmers and customers, and make the acquisition of food both more personal, and more distinctly place-rooted. Many towns have initiated farm markets as a part of revitalizing downtown areas, and downtown merchants often sponsor markets in their midstafter all, the
farmers’ market shopper is also one who is likely to be inclined to shop
locally in other places as well.
Throughout the United States, eating locally has gained in prominence, and ‘‘Eat Local’’ campaigns are now widespread. Whether
sponsored by local Chambers of Commerce, sustainable agriculture
groups, state Departments of Agriculture, or other organizations all
actively promote the idea of eating locally (Figure 4). An increasing
number of restaurants also promote their local connections, as diners look
for yet another means of filling their stomach in a place-based fashion.
Such establishments promise not only a good meal, but one with a story
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attached to ita story with local connections (Figure 5) (Trubek 2008; Inwood et al. 2009). Indeed, the local food movement is the most prominent and rapidly growing aspect of neolocalism.7 Numerous best-sellers, such as Michael Pollan’s The omnivore’s dilemma (2006) and Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, vegetable, miracle (2007), have fuelled awareness of the broader implications of our industrial food system. The idea of eating everything produced within a 100-mile radius has turned into a bit of a game as well, with ‘‘Eat Local Challenges’’ sprouting up to urge people to localize their food consumption for a period of time. Oxford American Dictionary even named ‘‘locavore,’’ a newly coined term for a person who consciously eats as much as possible from local farmers and food producers, its word of the year in 2007. This idea has become so Figure 4. Eat local campaigns are increasingly common. Here, Ithaca’s logo posts local eating as a revolutionary act, one with political overtones. Courtesy of www.eatingithaca.com, Edible Austin (copyright 2011; designed by Jenna Noel). 62 S.M. Schnell Downloaded by [New York University] at 10:06 12 February 2016 widespread that it has already engendered the inevitable backlash (see, e.g., Stein 2008) and was the subject of some good-natured ribbing in the first episode of Portlandia, a show set in that most hyper-neolocal of cities (Portlandia 2011). This surge to local eating is driven by a desire for local connections, but it has also been accelerated by an increased knowledge of, and concern for, the path that industrial agribusiness has blazed. With alarming regularity, headlines provide us with a new food scare
salmonella-laced peanut butter, melamine-poisoned milk and infant
formula, mad cow disease, infected jalapenos, and pesticide-laced drinking
water. The distant machinations of the food-industrial complex are
increasingly portrayed as producing products that are not only inferior
in taste, quality, and variety, but that may even kill you.
Local food, on the other hand, is positioned as a counter to the
impersonal industrial food economy, a means of sustenance that is placebased and personal, with a conscious link to community. It is also a means
for people to feel more connected with the sources of their food, to
personalize the increasingly impersonal networks of capital that provide
Figure 5. This restaurant, in Lawrence, Kansas, puts localness at the core of its
identity. Courtesy of Local Burger.
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our sustenance, and to connect citiesboth economically and psychologicallywith their countryside, a connection that the latter half of
the twentieth century largely severed.
This sense of opposition to the homogenization and loss of quality
caused by industrial agriculture has fuelled an expansion in the application of the European concept of terroir beyond the realm of wine to a
broader range of culinary activities, and applies it in a broader sense to all
foods that are intimately connected with place, whether traditional or
recent creations (Petrini 2003; Trubek 2008). This has seen its greatest
flourishing in the Slow Food movement, an international movement born
in Italy that takes a global view of the local, arguing that we can and
should act to preserve all food traditions that are localthat is to say, rooted in place and tradition. These can range from individual ingredients such as shagbark hickory nuts in Wisconsin or maple syrup in Vermont to distinctive recipes and artisanal production techniques (Petrini 2003; Trubek 2008). European countries, most notably Italy and France, have long accepted that there is an integral tie between food and place, and have developed a legal codification of regional appellations, reserving for particular producers using particular techniques in particular regions the right to apply a particular label such as Champagne or Asiago. The United States, on the other hand, does not have the same depth of strong regional food traditions, and chefs have only recently begun to deliberately attempt to establish distinctive local and regional cuisine (Trubek 2008). Localness in this context has become a valued descriptor, and the act of building up the idea of the connections between taste and place, and celebrating and encouraging them, has been a notable act of narrative and creation, in a country that has traditionally been concerned more with progress, efficiency, convenience, and cheapness. So where is ‘‘local’’? What is ‘‘local’’? We are, in part, defined (and define ourselves) by what we eat, what we wear, and where we shop. The microbrewed beer, the locally grown tomato, and the small local bookshop have become the equivalent of the flag or the national anthem of this new localism, symbols of this new local identity. Like all such symbols, they are vague, and they contain a wealth of ideals, contradictions, and contestations (Costa and Besio 2011). The ‘‘local’’ has become, in the famous phrase of Benedict Anderson, an ‘‘imagined community,’’ a socially constructed identity (Anderson 2006). So what is this idealized nation over which the rutabaga flag flies? What does it represent in the eyes of its inhabitants? The term ‘‘local’’ is vague, to say the least. Is something five miles away ‘‘local’’? How about fifteen? Fifty? What exactly is a ‘‘locally’’ 64 S.M. Schnell Downloaded by [New York University] at 10:06 12 February 2016 produced product? Is it local only if all the ingredients are produced locally? Only if all the labor that produced it is local? Or if the ownership of the company that produced it is local? Such questions have no intrinsically correct answer; instead, they must be negotiated each time the word ‘‘local’’ is employed, each time somebody deems ‘‘localness’’ as something worth having. To make the question more complicated, the meaning of ‘‘local,’’ particularly as it relates to local food, will necessarily be different in different places, and to different individuals and institutions within a given place, and even in different contexts to the same individual. Sometimes this is done out of necessityfor New York City to have ‘‘local produce’’
for example, requires a much larger foodshed than a small town. In other
cases, the ‘‘local’’ of eat-local campaigns coincides, somewhat illogically,
with political boundaries, as with state agriculture department campaigns
like Pennsylvania’s ‘‘PA Preferred.’’8
Such contradictory and overlapping usages of the term should come as
no surprise. As J.K. Gibson-Graham has pointed out (2002), even
scholars (who are fond of rigorous definitions of terminology) cannot
agree on what ‘‘local’’ means, or how it relates to the ‘‘global.’’ This stems
from the fact that, in the parlance of social scientists, scales are social/
cultural constructions and have no intrinsic meaning (see, e.g., GibsonGraham 2002; Brown and Purcell 2005; Born and Purcell 2006; Miyares
2008; Herod 2009). Is ‘‘the local’’ an interpretive frame through which we
analyze a situation? Is it the yin to globalism’s yang, each deriving
meaning from the other? Is globalization nothing more than a collection
of local places, or does globalization sit astride the world and become the
sole shaper of what we think of as local places? Or is the idea of localism a
shape-shifting entity that, in tandem with the also-nebulous idea of
globalism, is continually remaking our lived reality (Gibson-Graham
2002)?
What I am concerned with here are the different ways that ‘‘local’’ is
conceived of by participants in neolocal movements, and the implications
that this has on the identities that they derive from it. ‘‘Local’’ is always
shifting its meanings, both in time and in context. ‘‘Local’’ is continually
redefined, extolled and imbued with various virtues based on the current
political, cultural, and economic situation. Donald Meinig said that ‘‘any
landscape is composed not only of what lies before our eyes but what lies
within our heads’’ (Meinig 1979, p. 34); such a statement could just as
easily be made about the terminology we use to discuss the world. The
cultural meaning of ‘‘local’’ extends well beyond the dictionary definition
of the term. Below are several of the most dominant themes I have found
in the current rhetoric employed by neolocal advocates, themes that, by
extension, indicate the idealized sorts of places that people are increasingly identifying with.
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Eight views of the local
The ‘‘local’’ as non-global: The rise in neolocalism has occurred alongside
growing public awareness of ‘‘globalization.’’ (Figure 6). As news coverage of globalization has increased, public perception of the globalized
nature of the world economy has also likely shifted. Increasingly, many are
not comfortable with what they see. ‘‘Local’’ then, conceptually becomes
the opposite of everything that the ‘‘global’’ is seen to be: personal instead
of faceless, fair instead of exploitive, democratic instead of plutocratic,
unique instead of homogenous. Indeed, the list is virtually endless;
whatever globalization is, we locals are not. Of course, reality is
considerably messier than such conceptions. Without this perception
among a sizeable segment of the public that globalization is a distinctly
negative phenomenon, the ‘‘local’’ would likely lose some of its draw; it
takes on meaning precisely because of what it is perceived not to be.
The ‘‘local’’ as transparent: Another recurring theme is the idea of
transparency in economic interactions. Global supply chains have
stretched so far, and become so convoluted, that it can be almost
impossible to determine where the things you buy were produced, and
under what conditions. In the wake of such disconnection, all matter of ills
can creep inexploitation of workers, inhumane treatment of animals, environmental degradation, and so forth. The rhetorical promise of localism is that transparency can be restored to the system. If you know Figure 6. The rise in neolocalism, measured here by usage of the term ‘‘local food’’ in articles in the New York Times, follows shortly after the large upsurge in usage of ‘‘globalization’’ in the late 1990s. Both terms experienced a huge upswing as the term was becoming more commonly a subject of discussion, and then a subsequent decline in usage. 66 S.M. Schnell Downloaded by [New York University] at 10:06 12 February 2016 the producers of your goods and your food, so the argument goes, then abuses of labor, of the environment, and of places, are less likely to occur. What is created through the local discourse is a narrativea story that
directly connects the consumer with the place and people that produced
the products they consume, a narrative in which nothing is hidden or
unknown.
The ‘‘local’’ as non-corporate: What is notable is that pro-local activists
are not necessarily anti-globalization. What they are often against is the
form of globalization that has often traveled under the name
‘‘neoliberalism’’the move to a market system devoid of government interventions driven by the developed world, a system that often is seen to favor large corporations at the expense of individuals, communities, and countries. More than being ‘‘anti-global,’’ the neolocal movement is anticorporate. Indeed, this is one of the most common and powerful appeals made by advocates of neolocalism. Whether in terms of alternative agriculture, breweries, or local living economies movements, the corporation is often singled out as one of the biggest culprits in the un-making of place. One of the biggest attractions of ‘‘local’’ enterprises for many is the fact that they are not owned by faceless corporations (who have become the objects of much suspicion and mistrust among the local movement). In part, this is due to the legal structure of publicly held corporations, whose legal standing requires them to put the profit of their shareholders above all other concerns, including the defense of places’ uniqueness, character, environment, economic health, and well-being (Bakan 2004). The ‘‘local’’ as unique: A side effect of large-scale corporate globalization has been the homogenization of the landscapefrom the building
styles to the stores you shop in. This is, of course, not news to geographers
and other observers of the landscape, who, for a third of a century have
discussed and debated the ‘‘Geography of Nowhere’’ (see notably Relph
1976, Kunstler 1993). Promoters of neolocal enterprises argue that we need
to make (or re-make) distinctive. The twentieth-century mantra of
convenience and standardization is outdated, they argue, and it has led
to homogenous landscapes that are impossible to identify meaningfully
with. As a result, when businesses are seen as unique, when your town offers
things that can’t be found in other places, such enterprises can become an
intrinsic part of local identity and a point of pride for many communities
(Figure 7).
The ‘‘local’’ as environmentally responsible: Local enterprises are often
touted as being a more ecologically responsible alternative to global ones.
At its simplest level, such claims relate to the amount of fossil fuel and the
resultant pollution needed to get goods to market. The assumption is that
locally sourced goods will require less fossil fuel to get to market.9 As a
result, the idea of food miles, for example, has become an entrenched part
of the concept of localization, and has gained a great deal of traction
among the public. Local enterprises are also often argued to be better
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environmental stewards than multinational firms. The typical argument
states that, whereas a corporation with absentee owners has no stake in
ensuring the long-term viability of an operation in a given place, those who
are rooted in place are much more likely to take a long-term view, and to
ensure that their land continues to sustain themselves and their community
over the long term (Wicks 2008, Wicks n.d.). It is not hard to find
counterexamples where locals have not been the best stewards of the land
and water (Bhanoo 2010; Flam 2010; McGlone 2010). It is also true that
local actors are not entirely independent, but are themselves enmeshed in
broader systems of politics and economics. But absentee ownership, absent
government regulation or serious public pressure, all but guarantees that
environmental health will take a back seat to profits (Bakan 2004).
The ‘‘local’’ as empowered and self-sufficient: By removing control over
economic destiny from distant shareholders and boardrooms and putting
Figure 7. Local pride can even be found in a humble toothbrush (albeit in this
case, one favored by Sting, Robert Redford, Whoopi Goldberg, Jane Fonda, and
Cher), seen in this display at Global Libations, a Kutztown, PA, coffee shop.
Photograph by author (see also www.radiustoothbrush.com).
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it back in the community, advocates of local business networks argue,
local spending keeps decision-making power in the hands of local
residents, and keep money close to home (Shuman 2000). Indeed,
although exact numbers vary widely, research has shown that money
spent at a locally owned store is much more likely to remain in the
community than money spent at a chain store (Civic Economics 2004).
The density of locally owned small businesses is positively correlated with
economic growth, while the density of large, non-local firms has a negative
relationship (Fleming and Goetz 2011). Well beyond that, advocates say, if
business owners live in the communities affected by their decisions, they
are more likely to make decisions that benefit the community (Kolko and
Neumark 2010). After decades of news stories highlighting factory
closures, job losses, and outsourcing, it is not hard to understand the
appeal of locally rooted economic endeavors. In some cases, communities
have even pooled their resources to create their own community-owned
andoperated stores and restaurants in places ignored or abandoned by the fickle hand of market forces (Hewitt 2010; Cortese 2011). The ‘‘local’’ as community-building: Local enterprises are portrayed by neolocal advocates as fostering a sense of community. Whether through local business organizations like the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE), CSA farms, or farmers’ markets, a key part of the rhetoric promoting local enterprises is the added sense of connection you have with your neighbors with an increasing of personal-scale connections and mutual support between people, and between people and businesses. This is often stated in contrast to the commodity chains of the global economy, where people lose personal contact with the sources of the food and products they buy. Economic relationships in this conception become embedded within a broader web of human relations, rendering them more multi-dimensional. Transactions are no longer just economic exchanges, but also interactions between neighbors and friends, based on mutual respect. Thus, as globalization accelerates this process, some people increasingly yearn to return to an idealized past, prior to the coming of corporations and outsourcing. The prototypical example of this is the early-twentieth-century American small town, where (presumably) one knew all the people you interacted with economically. It is an idealized world, to be sure (imagine, for example, being African-American in a small town in Alabama in 1930), but it speaks clearly about the sense of connectedness that neolocal advocates are craving. The ‘‘local’’ as authentic: The idea that the local is more real, more authentic, and higher quality also pervades local marketing campaigns. The implication is that local products are made by ‘‘real’’ people whom you know, rather than simply the result of elaborate marketing ruses fostered by multinational advertising firms and their corporate clients (Figure 8). They are also seen as less likely to use harmful ingredients, and Journal of Cultural Geography 69 Downloaded by [New York University] at 10:06 12 February 2016 are portrayed as intimately linked to place, history, and tradition. Products rooted in a community are valued not necessarily because of what they are, but because of what they representlocal things made by
local people, in, one is led to assume, humane and fair working conditions.
The ‘‘local’’ as all of the above: Many of these themes are often present
in the same organization or individual. Consider the words of Judy Wicks,
a prominent national promoter of local economies which sum up the
interlinked nature of these facets of neolocal identity:
Today most of us no longer know who grows our food, who bakes our
bread, brews our beer, sews our clothes, or builds our houses. We’ve become
disconnected from each other and from our places. …Many towns and
cities have lost their unique identity as streets are lined with the same chain
stores found everywhere or left deserted as customers flock to big box
stores, owned by distant corporations selling goods produced in faraway
sweatshops and factory farms. Without direct relationships, few of us think
about the consequences of our economic transactions on other people and
communities, on animals and the natural environment (Wicks 2008, p. 4
5).
Figure 8. The local as authentic: sign advertising a small art gallery in Topton,
PA. Photograph by author.
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While it is in the nature of an academic analysis to pick apart and itemize,
it is important not to lose sight of the fact that neolocalism, for many, is a
multifaceted project, one that attempts to unify many of the idealizations
of the local.
Networked neolocals
When Shortridge first identified the trend of neolocalism, he described it
as a manifestation of a search for identity in place in an increasingly
rootless society. However, over the past decade, it has become something
much more expansive and ambitious. Increasingly, people are forming
national and international networks of neolocals, mutual support
organizations for their mutual interests in preserving distinctive places.
Both of the examples discussed belowFoodRoutes and BALLE (The Business Alliance for Local Living Economies)are taking an innovative
approachalbeit a paradoxical one: they are trying to create a national local movement. The identities they are promoting are identities tied not only to a specific place, but also to the broader idea of localness and place distinctiveness. One example of this is The FoodRoutes Network, which started in Pennsylvania in 2003. FoodRoutes is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to provide marketing, communication, and informational assistance to local groups who want to promote a culture of local eating in their own areas. In its own words, ‘‘FRN is dedicated to reintroducing Americans to their foodthe seeds it grows from, the farmers who
produce it, and the routes that carry it from the fields to their tables’’
(FoodRoutes 2012). Their most visible endeavor has been their ‘‘Buy
Fresh, Buy Local’’ campaign, which now has state chapters and local
affiliates in 24 states. Some chapters are state-based, some city-based,
while others are focused on a particular physical regionthe nature of what is ‘‘local’’ varies widely. Their promotions attempt to use the power of branding to market local foods, and to put the idea of local eating foremost in consumers’ minds. Their various logos are visually unified, yet each one changed to reflect the distinctive nature of a region’s food production (Figure 9). In essence, they are creating a national brand identity around the idea of eating locally.10 Other undertakings are even more ambitious. In 2001, Judy Wicks (a Philadelphia restaurateur) and Laury Hammel, founded BALLE. BALLE is an international network of local groups that promote networks of ‘‘local living economies,’’ defined as economies that adhere to a ‘‘triple bottom line’’ model of success: people, planet, and profit. Since its founding, it has expanded to more than seventy chapters throughout North America and the United Kingdom, each focused on creating a selfconscious network of residents and businesses. Particulars of membership are left up to individual chapters, but common elements include buying Journal of Cultural Geography 71 Downloaded by [New York University] at 10:06 12 February 2016 products and supplies from businesses that share similar values, providing a living wage (sufficient to live in a particular locale) and safe working conditions, engaging in fair trade, cooperating with other businesses, and protecting the environment. The ultimate goal is to create local economies that buy when possible from other local sources, and when that is not possible, to patronize entrepreneurs and economies that follow these principles in other locations (BALLE 2012). Such networks are distinctly local, but they are not isolated; they are, in BALLE’s words ‘‘bottom-up, networked change’’ (BALLE 2012). They are, in fact, using the tools of globalization, such as the internet, to achieve the goal of establishing greater local autonomy and a culture of the local on a national level. As the Small Business Network of Portland puts it, ‘‘We encourage you to get involved with us as we celebrate and create our unique community’’ (SBNP 2010). Both parts of that are key
this is seen not only as an economic undertaking, but also as a promotion
of place, community, and identity.
The first step in BALLE’s approach, like FoodRoutes, is the buy-local
campaign (BALLE 2012). Buy-local movements are nothing new in
American history (Allen and Hinrichs 2007). But the tone and tenor of the
Figure 9. Creating a local, yet national, brand image. Courtesy of FoodRoutes
Network.
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BALLE movement is different. Rather than a simple defense of one’s own
place, BALLE involves businesses in actively partnering not only with
others in their locality and their ostensible competitors, but also with
businesses across the country who share similar values. Currently, more
than 22,000 entrepreneurs are members of their local BALLE network
(BALLE 2012). As chapters develop, they move into more the complicated matter of creating the ‘‘building blocks’’ of the local economy that
do not exist, by fostering entrepreneurship in these areas.
Co-opting the local?
How mainstream has the be-local, buy-local movement become? Consider
for a moment this quotation:
[W]e offer fresh produce that’s grown nearby by local farmers that love their
work and love their land. There are so many local farms that supply a wide
variety of produce to our stores. These farms form the backbone of our local
economies. And these farmers are people that live in our local communities.
The name of the earthy-crunchy local co-op that uses these words on their
website? Wal-Mart, the poster child for destruction of local economies,
which has recently, and somewhat perversely, hopped on the buy-local
bandwagon (Wal-Mart 2010). And indeed, Wal-Mart has moved towards
more local sourcing of produce for its stores (Bustillo and Kesmodel
2011), though they have been critiqued for their methods in doing so
(Mitchell 2011). The fact that Wal-Mart’s motives are purely commercial
shows that the lure of the local has increasingly important financial
implications. In its turn to ‘‘local’’ imagery, Wal-Mart is far from alone
(Figure 10a
b). Safeway and Albertsons, for example, recently received
criticism for creating faux-farmers markets in front of some of their stores
(Wingfield and Worthen 2010).
One of the newest, most thorough, and most ironic corporate
makeovers occurred in spring and summer 2009 in Seattle, where
Starbucks rolled out two remodeled stores with a new concept, the ‘‘street
level coffee experience.11 The new stores have furnishings re-purposed
from other local buildings, such as seats used from a defunct local theater,
along with LEED-certified design features, as well as wine and beer. They
also showcase local craftsmanship in construction, and attempt to create
interiors that reflect their neighborhood. But the most notable shift has
been in what you don’t seethe name Starbucks. The company opted to remove its name entirely from the stores, and to re-brand the bags of coffee and other products sold there with the name of the local neighborhood. 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea was one of first of these stores (15th Avenue Coffee and Tea 2010; Seattle Times 2009), along with Roy Street Coffee & Tea. The company had planned to extend this Journal of Cultural Geography 73 Downloaded by [New York University] at 10:06 12 February 2016 concept to the rest of the country (and world) if this initial foray into local branding were successful. Ironically, the place where this rebranding was piloted is in the one city where Starbucks has a legitimate claim to being localits home city of Seattle (Figure 11a
b).
Such a shift explicitly recognizes the changing public mood towards
local enterprises. According to Arthur Rubinfeld, President of Starbucks
Global Development, ‘‘We recognize the importance of continuously
Figure 10. (A) London-based HSBC, a multinational banking firm with offices
in more than 80 countries, now advertises itself as ‘‘the World’s Local Bank,’’ a
curious designation given its origin as The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking
Corporation, formed in the 1860s to foster trade between China and Europe
(http://www.hsbc.com/1/2/about). (B) This grocery store in Kutztown, PA
exemplifies this trend as well. ‘‘Local’’ in this case seems to refer to the
Pennsylvania-based ownership of the store, because there is not notably more
local food on the shelves than at other conventional supermarkets. And even the
idea of it as a local (Pennsylvania-based) company is somewhat questionable; since
it is a publicly traded company, its ownership resides worldwide. Photographs by
author.
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evolving with our customers’ interests, lifestyles and values in order to
stay relevant over the long term. Our new design approach will allow
customers to feel truly at home when visiting their local store and give
them opportunities for discovery at our other locations around the
world’’ (Starbucks 2009). To achieve this new, local feel, Starbucks sent
groups of observers to scout out other locally owned coffee shops in their
hometown in order to figure out how to be a local Seattle coffee shop.
Needless to say, this caused some tension, and indeed, the entire process
resulted in vociferous debate on the comment boards of The Stranger, a
local independent weekly newspaper (Seattle Times 2009; The Stranger
2009). Such a move shows that the anti-corporate rhetoric of the local
economy movement has had an impact; the lure of a homogenous front
is no longer the draw that it once was, and the locally distinctive is seen
to have some potential to reverse Starbucks’ slide. Whether this and
other attempts by large corporations to remake themselves in a neolocal
image involve genuine change or are merely localwashing remains to be
seen. The Roy Street Coffee & Tea store is still in existence, but
Starbucks unceremoniously changed the 15th Street store back to a
standard-issue Starbucks in early 2011, indicating that denizens of
Seattle, one of the epicenters of neolocal sentiment, did not buy into the
fakeout attempt.
Figure 11. (A) The former 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea in Seattle, ‘‘Inspired by
Starbucks’’ (that is, inspired by itself). (B) Protestors criticized the new nonStarbucks as ‘‘faux-local,’’ while the company argues that it is merely trying to
become a better fit in the neighborhoods where it locates (Courtesy of Kat
Steinglass and www.thestranger.com).
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The geography of neolocalism
While aspects of neolocalism can be found throughout the country, it
seems to catch on earlier and stronger in some areas than in others (Figure
12a
c). There are remarkable similarities, for example, between the maps
Figure 12. Remarkable similarities between the maps of BALLE chapters,
microbreweries, and community-supported agriculture farms seems to indicate a
distinctive geography of neolocalism. (A) community-supported agriculture farms
in 2008 (data from RVE 2010); (B) microbreweries and brewpubs 2012 (data from
Real Beer, Inc. 2012); (C) BALLE networks 2012 (data from BALLE 2012).
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of microbreweries, community supported agriculture farms, and the
network of BALLE local business networks. Initially, all caught on
most strongly in the urban and suburban northeast, the upper Midwest,
western Oregon and Washington, and Northern California, as well as
along the Front Range of the Rockies, and in areas around college towns.
In the case of breweries and CSAs, they have now expanded to the more
resistant Plains and Southeast, but are still strongest in their initial areas.
BALLE, which is a younger, more ambitious concept, is still largely
confined to these early-adopter areas, though it too has begun to spread in
recent years.
Such areas tend to be relatively wealthier, more politically progressive,
whiter (and slightly more Hispanic) urban and suburban areas (Table 1).
Counties with a CSA or microbrewery also have a smaller percentage of
their population born in that county than counties without such
enterprises. This lends support to the argument that people are driven
to neolocalism in part out of a search for rootedness, a desire no doubt felt
more keenly by people who have been on the move. Both CSAs and
microbreweries show similar patterns, which is not surprising given that
they follow similar distributions. However, this is not the entire story, and
indeed, stopping here can leave an overly stereotyped picture of
neolocalism as simply the province solely of a white, privileged elite. To
attempt a more detailed analysis of the type of communities more
receptive to neolocal enterprises, I employed the twelve county types
developed by Dante Chinni and James Gimpel as part of their Patchwork
Nation project, an attempt to move beyond the simplistic red/blue state
Figure 12. continued
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motif that passes for political analysis (2010).12 Using principal components analysis on a whole host of socio/economic/political data, they
devised a classification of twelve county types (Table 2)13 Using these
twelve county types, I compared the percentage of the country’s
population that lived in counties of each type, and compared it with the
percentage of the CSAs and microbreweries in my data set that are found
in those counties (Figure 13).
The largest overrepresentation of microbreweries and CSAs can be
found in Boom Towns, areas of growing diversity, and recent arrivals.
Other classes where neolocalism is overrepresented are the Monied Burbs,
the Industrial Metropolis, Emptying Nests, and Campus and Careers.
Those where they are heavily under-represented include Immigration
Nation, Minority Central, Tractor Country, Service Worker Centers, and
Military Bastions. Mormon Outposts, meanwhile, are distributed roughly
equal with their population. And then we have the Evangelical Epicenters,
areas that have a high adherence to evangelical Christianity and a
Table 1. Comparisons between CSA/non-CSA counties, and microbrewery/nonmicrobrewery counties. Figures are the mean values for the counties in each
category. Gray shading indicates the larger of the two values in each comparison.
CSA Non-CSA Micro. Non-Micro.
Average HH income in $ 52657 43443 55299 43278
% white 95.6 87.9 92.1 89.0
% black 6.4 10.0 8.0 9.5
% Hispanic 8.5 7.2 10.3 6.8
% Native American 1.0 2.3 1.5 2.1
% Asian/Pacific 2.4 0.9 3.3 0.8
% Pop. age 20
34 21.1 19.8 21.8 19.7
% Pop. age 35
49 23.1 21.1 23.3 21.1
%Pop. age 50
64 19.6 18.7 19.4 18.7
% Pop. age 65 and up 14.9 15.5 14.1 15.7
% w/ HH Income 0
20K 22.3 28.8 21.4 28.7
% w/ HH Income 20
40K 26.5 29.2 25.8 29.3
% w/ HH Income 40
60K 20.5 19.5 20.1 19.6
% w/ HH Income 60
75K 10.4 8.6 10.5 8.6
% w/ HH Income 75
100K 9.4 6.7 10.0 6.7
% w/ HH Income 100
125K 4.3 2.6 4.8 2.6
% w/ HH Income 125
150K 1.9 1.1 2.2 1.1
% w/ HH Income 150
200K 1.6 0.9 1.9 0.8
% w/ Income 200K-up 1.7 1.0 2.1 1.0
% Coll.Grad. School Enroll. 20.4 15.0 23.6 14.6
% Born In State of Residence 65.9 70.5 59.3 71.7
% with HS Diploma 81.7 76.2 83.8 76.0
Repub. Pres. Vote 2004 54.7 61.7 51.9 62.0
Dem. Pres. Vote 2004 44.2 37.3 46.9 37.0
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decidedly conservative political profile, actually are more likely to have
CSAs than their population alone would predict, though not surprisingly,
they have not taken as much to microbreweries.
What these two analyses in tandem show is that we must be careful
about overgeneralization. Though the Monied Burbs meet the generalizations we see in Table 1, many of the others do notIndustrial Metropolis counties, for example, are quite diverse, while Emptying Nests are considerably older on average than the nation as a whole. In addition, there is clearly a regional effect that demographics alone, and even the broader county types, cannot account for. Some parts of the country, most notably the Plains states and the Southeast, seem to be more resistant to neolocal enterprises, even when you take into account the differing demographics, whereas the early-adopter areas are considerably more open to them. To name just a few examples, although Service Worker Centers nationwide are less prone to having CSAs or microbreweries, there is a large swath of these counties in places like upstate New York that have become centers of neolocal activity. Similarly, the clustering in the upper Midwest in states like Michigan and Wisconsin cannot be simply explained with recourse to demographics or political inclinations. Careful consideration of the maps turns up many more examples. This leads me to conclude that the move to neolocalism is not readily reducible to any of these categories, although many of the socio/ economic/political variables do clearly have an impact. In part, I think that this is because there is a decided libertarian streak to many neolocal enterprises, one that cuts across and confounds traditional political categories in this country, an anti-bigness that applies Figure 13. Percentage of U.S. microbreweries and CSAs found in each of the twelve county types, compared with the percent of the U.S. population residing in each county type. Journal of Cultural Geography 79 Downloaded by [New York University] at 10:06 12 February 2016 equally to corporations and to government. There would seem to be room to greatly expand the movement’s appeal for those who see neolocalism as a broader economic, political, and social project. Perhaps the rhetoric of neolocals needs to shift in some regions to broaden their appeal, to focus less on the anti-corporate rhetoric that gains much mileage in more progressive areas, and to focus instead on themes of local distinctiveness, local autonomy, local independence, and local free enterprisethemes
that are likely to be more resonant in more culturally conservative
Table 2. Patchwork Nation community type definitions. Authored by Dante
Chinni and Dr. James Gimpel, 2008. Copyright 2008
2011 The Jefferson Institute
for the Study of World Politics, Licensed to Users under Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerive 3.0 Unported License.
Community Type Definition
Boom Towns Fast growing communities with rapidly diversifying
populations
Campus and
Careers
Cities and towns with young, educated populations; more
secular and Democratic than other American communities
Emptying Nests Home to many retirees and aging baby boomer populations;
less diverse than the nation at large
Evangelical
Epicenters
Communities with a high proportion of evangelical
Christians, found mostly in small towns and suburbs;
slightly older than the U.S. average; loyal Republican voters
Immigration
Nation
Communities with large Latino populations and lower-thanaverage incomes, typically clustered in the South and
Southwest
Industrial
Metropolis
Densely populated, highly diverse urban centers; incomes
trend higher than the national average and voters lean
Democratic
Military Bastions Areas with high employment in the military or related to the
presence of the military and large veteran populations; likely
Republican voters though Democratic President Obama
gained ground in 2008
Minority Central Home to large pockets of black residents but a below
average percentage of Hispanics and Asians
Monied Burbs Wealthier, highly educated communities with a median
household income of $15,000 above the national county
average
Mormon Outposts Home to a large share of members of the Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-Day Saints and slightly higher median
household incomes
Service Worker
Centers
Midsize and small towns with economies fueled by hotels,
stores and restaurants and lower-than-average median
household income by county
Tractor County Mostly rural and remote smaller towns with older
populations and large agricultural sectors
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quarters of our country. In fact, the ideas of neolocalism, of greater ties to
place, are not intrinsically conservative or liberal, and it is counterproductive for movements that hope to bring about lasting change to
confine their appeals to one end of the political spectrum.
Critiques of the local
It is easy to find examples where each of the virtues associated with the
local fail to materialize in practice. Sometimes, in fact, the various goals of
localism are at odds with each other. There are many Mennonite farmers
in southeastern Pennsylvania who sell produce at local stands. From the
standpoint of a local foods advocate, what could be more idealistic? On
further examination, however, some are active users of sewage sludge on
their fields, a practice that has been condemned by others as extremely
unhealthy for people and the environment (USFA 2010). The goals of
transparency and environmental virtue then are undermined at a distinctly
local level.
Indeed, scholars have gone to increasing lengths in recent years to
point out that scale has few, if any, intrinsic qualities. Just because
something is ‘‘local,’’ despite the rhetoric of local movement promoters,
it is not automatically more just, healthier, or more sustainable than
national- or global-scale enterprises. Born and Purcell have termed this
assumption of virtue automatically adhering to a particular scale ‘‘the
local trap’’ (Brown and Purcell 2005; Born and Purcell 2006). Indeed, the
rhetoric of many local movements does often equate localness with more
desirable outcomes in many realmssustainability, social justice, democracy, and nutrition, to name a few. Some critics go even further. Born and Purcell have argued that ‘‘local scale food systems are equally likely to be just or unjust, sustainable or unsustainable, secure or insecure’’ (2006, p. 195). It has also become commonplace for scholars to critique neolocal enterprises as potential instances of ‘‘defensive localism,’’ a sort of local chauvinism that is seen as catering to a whole array of humanity’s baser instincts. In some of this scholarship there is an assumption that defense of place is necessarily a bad thing, that it necessarily leads to xenophobia and bigotry. They argue that, in creating the ‘‘us’’ of the local, local identities inevitably create a ‘‘them’’ that is excluded (at best) and demonized (at worst) (Hinrichs 2000, 2003; Winter 2003; DuPuis and Goodman 2005). Local elites, they argue, can be every bit as exclusionary as larger scale systems, and local old boy networks can shut non-whitemales out of power, and economic influence,14 and ‘‘can provide the ideological foundations for reactionary politics and nativist sentiment’’ (DuPuis and Goodman 2005, p. 360). Critics have also argued that the local food movement is ‘‘a-political (anti-democratic, anti-reflexive)’’ (DuPuis and Goodman 2005, p. 360), and that it often ignores questions Journal of Cultural Geography 81 Downloaded by [New York University] at 10:06 12 February 2016 of social justice (i.e., access to quality food for all). Indeed, these scholars have voiced their opposition to any movement that relies on defense of place as a goal in and of itself, dismissing all ‘‘local’’ movements as mere nativism (most forcefully Born and Purcell 2006). While such critiques have some merit, I feel that, by relying on vague, ‘‘could-be, it’s possible’’ generalities, they greatly overstate their case, creating a skewed picture, and fundamentally misrepresent the nature of neolocal movements. And they are considerably off the mark when they argue that local movements reduce the ‘‘lens of who we care about,’’ (Hinrichs 2003, p. 37) or that ‘‘‘the local’ as a concept intrinsically implies the inclusion and exclusion of particular people, places, and ways of life’’ (DuPuis and Goodman 2005, p. 361). Expanding the lens Certainly as it regards the neolocal movements I have examined, such statements ring false. As Clare Hinrichs has noted, self-conscious localness does not necessarily lead down this path; it can also lead to a more open, inclusive view of the world as well, expanding and not contracting the lens of who we care about (Hinrichs 2003). Doreen Massey has made a similar point, arguing that there is nothing intrinsically exclusionary about localness. Although it can be, place need not be bound and exclusionary; it can also serve to create a sense of responsible linkages with the wider world (Massey 1999, p. 155). I would argue that such place-rooted activism is precisely the kind of engagement that is needed to evince true, lasting social change at any level. Local places are the sites of day-to-day human action and experience. The nature of people’s connection to local places is qualitatively different than to broader, more abstract affiliations (Tuan 1975), and any social movement that ignores this is bound to fail. Because of the more personal nature of such connections, defense of place provides a powerful incentive to action. Neolocalism can also engage people in reflexive thinking about the relationships our actions have on a wider social, economic, and natural world by encouraging people to identify with and care not only about their ‘‘local,’’ but also about the idea of the ‘‘local’’ in general. In short, place is not a distraction to the goals of building a more sustainable, just, and livable world; it enables it. What seems to be emerging, then, through the various aspects of neolocalism, is a distinct turn to ‘‘the local’’ as a primary form of identity, and the promotion of people thinking of themselves not only in the sense of abstract symbols, but also in terms of what they buy, what they eat, whom they interact with, and identifying not only with their own places, but with the idea of place itself. Corporations have long encouraged identifying with brand names (Klein 2000); in some ways, neolocalism is 82 S.M. Schnell Downloaded by [New York University] at 10:06 12 February 2016 turning such strategies on their head by encouraging identification with ‘‘the local’’ instead. What makes neolocal identities potentially more powerful than they may appear on the surface is through the visible effects they have, the alternative spaces that they create. As Andrew Herod has argued, a dominant discourse concerning corporate-led globalization is TINA
‘‘There is no alternative’’ (Herod 2009). But CSAs, microbreweries, citizen
watershed groups, farmers’ markets, and the like are (in some cases
literally) visceral proof that there are spaces for alternatives. The
importance of such a realization should not be understated. Class
consciousness as a form of identity has not exactly panned out as Marx
had envisioned, but the drive for people to identify with local places seems
to be a much stronger urge.
Neolocalism is defensive. But it is also creative and positive. Just as
importantly, it indicates an unwillingness to cede the shape that one’s
place takes to abstract forces beyond one’s controladopting the idea instead that there is an alternative. This, in essence, creates a new narrative of place adopted by neolocals, one not driven by impersonal market forces but rather by individual and community empowerment. The new narrative of ‘‘the local’’ consists of an interwoven set of virtues and ideals that it is supposed to typify. As critics have pointed out, just being local is not a guarantee that such abuses will not continue. But because of the way that it embeds economic transactions and identity in a broader social matrix, it lays the groundwork for the creation of a world where values other than the purely economic shape our lived reality. Neolocalism is not really the opposite of globalization. In fact, it is enabled by globalization. Without the homogenization of place over the past half century, it seems quite likely that conscious cultivation of place attachments would not be as strong as it is today. In addition, without the media networks that have created a globally interlinked world, the ideas of localism would have a much more provincial base. Instead, neolocal identities have become part of a broader political, social, and economic undertaking, one in which local knowledge, local economy, and local connections are all consciously cultivated, and one in which place connections are nurtured. At the heart of such a project is the idea of narrative and identity (Tuan 1991). From the local yarns behind the beer names at the local brew pub, to the narrative that traces the origins of your tomato to a specific plot of earth and a specific farmer, to the effort to establish and support a network of locally rooted businesses, all focus on creating a narrative of place in which the participant plays an active, personally connected role. It is an identity that becomes much more than ‘‘who I am,’’ but also a statement of ‘‘what I am a part of.’’ Pete Shortridge has long argued forcefully for the importance of studying the subjective aspects of human experience through the complex interplay of identity, place, and narrative. As he observed in concluding Journal of Cultural Geography 83 Downloaded by [New York University] at 10:06 12 February 2016 his groundbreaking study of the images of the American Midwest more than twenty years ago, ‘‘[t]here is an increased realization that the positive values that grow out of a rootedness in place are needed to give meaning to life ….’’ (1989, p. 141). Shortridge was referring here to the Midwest’s role as a repository of idealized pastoral imagery, a place whose image allowed Americans to see themselves as directly connected with the landscape that sustains them. In the decades since Shortridge’s observation, the rapid rise in globalization has rendered the search for connection and local identity more vital than ever. Increasingly, Americans are looking for this rootedness not only in the imagery of the Midwest, but also much closer to home, and in more concrete, active, and diverse ways. Shortridge’s fellow Kansan Wes Jackson has argued for conceiving of the Earth at a local levelnot as a unified whole, but as a group of places
to which people are attached (Jackson 1996). And he asks people to
develop a relationship with their ecosystems, to root themselves firmly in
nature and place. In countless ways, big and small, Americans are doing
just that*becoming native to this place.
Notes

1. The term is now discussed in many of the standard introductory human/
   cultural geography textbooks (Fouberg, Murphy, and de Blij 2009; Fellman,
   et al. 2010; Greiner 2011; Domosh, et al. 2013). Although Shortridge first
   employed the term ‘‘neolocalism,’’ Raimondo Strassoldo (1992) used the term
   ‘‘new localism’’ in a similar fashionreferring to a deliberate response to globalization of rooting oneself in a localityin his study of regionalism in
   Italy a couple of years earlier.
2. Although I focus here primarily on commercial manifestations of neolocalism,
   the urge for local connections encompasses many other phenomena as well.
   For example, the past twenty years have seen a large increase in numbers of
   local watershed associations. They often monitor pollution and water quality,
   promote understanding of plant and animal communities that depend on the
   watershed, and work to increase awareness of the relationships between people
   and the watersheds that support them, promoting a vision of place as one
   inextricably intertwined with the landscapes that we inhabit. The bioregionalism movement that began in the 1970s takes this concept even further,
   advocating a fundamental reorganization of society to create political
   structures and boundaries that are in line with biological regions that would
   be more responsive and sensitive to the geographical and biological realities of
   the landscapes they inhabit (Sale 1985).
3. The local living economies movement is a movement whose goals are to create
   viable networks of local businesses that are financially viable as well as
   ecologically and socially responsible.
4. An extended version of this discussion can be found in Schnell and Reese
5. See also Flack 1997 for a discussion of the earlier development of
   microbreweries.
6. See Schnell 2007 for an expanded discussion of CSAs.
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7. This number is actually 1) almost a complete fabrication, and 2) almost
   certainly way too small, an argument that I expand on in a forthcoming article.
8. Local eating has also become a mainstream part of the tourist industry. In a
   comparative study of state and provincial tourism guides, I examined changes
   in promotion strategies between 1993 and 2008, and one of the most notable
   shifts was to an emphasis on agritourism and local eating. Incidence of the
   word ‘‘local’’ in tourism booklets increased tenfold. Local foods and farms are
   now almost uniformly touted as a way to experience the real, authentic place, a
   marketing strategy that was barely present fifteen years ago (Schnell 2011).
9. See http://www.agriculture.state.pa.us/papreferred/lib/papreferred/documents/
   3-11-09_Revised_PA_PREFERRED_Agreement_Package.pdf for an example
   of the ways in which ‘‘local’’ is codified in such programs. See also Hinrichs
   2003 for a discussion of the definition of ‘‘local’’ in the context of a ‘‘local’’
   Iowa dinner.
10. Some studies have disputed this claim (see Saunders, Barber, and Taylor 2006
    for the most notable example), and argued that in some circumstances, longdistance transport is actually more ecologically minded than local production.
    Such arguments typically rely on cherry-picked examples to try and leave a
    broader impression.
11. Some have argued that this idea is an oxymoron (Allen and Hinrichs 2007),
    but I disagree. Indeed, I would argue that the creation of a broader
    consciousness of localness is a vital part of creating a local food movement
    that more broadly penetrates all sectors of society.
12. A third is located in Disneyland Park in Paris*also an interesting choice,
    since Disney was the subject of much controversy when it first opened in Paris,
    accused of cultural imperialism by French activists.
13. See also www.patchworknation.org for fuller methodological explanations
    and for full-color maps detailing the distribution of these different county
    types.
14. Although it is a simplification to assign each county to a single type (my own
    county, Berks PA, is classed as ‘‘Monied Burbs’’ while being home to Reading,
    which was just named the city with the highest poverty rate in America), an
    analysis using each county’s score in each of the twelve categories yielded
    similar results.
15. There is not space in this article to address this critique fully; I am addressing
    it at much greater length in a forthcoming article.
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