IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

4 Locality
The chicken breast packets in my supermarket in Amsterdam bear a photograph
of the Swedish farmer who rears the birds. He is leaning on the
wooden fence of an attractive-looking farm. Behind him are blue sky and
green trees. The label recounts a little story about the town where the
farmer lives. Before you ask: No, they don’t show a picture of the exchicken
itself—but I’m nonetheless intrigued. What’s going on here—
why am I being provided with this background information? It’s a packet
of chicken, not a package holiday. My questions contain their own answer.
The farmer’s locality has become as much a product as the chicken’s
leg. The legs of dead chickens look and taste pretty much the same, and
it’s a challenge to make each one look attractive and different. Human
beings and places, on the other hand, are different from one another.
Associate your product with nice people, and a nice place, and it should
do well.
My chicken-in-a-context is an example of how the focus of both business
and social innovation is shifting from locomotion—sourcing things in
poor places and shipping them to rich ones—to locality. Authenticity, local
context, and local production are increasingly desirable attributes in the
things we buy and the services we use. Local sells, and for that reason is a
powerful antidote to mobility expansion.
But design to enhance locality is easier said than done. Localities contain
a lot of nature, for example, and nature is the result of millions of years of
iterative, trial-and-error design. Biologists describe as choronomic the influence
on a process of its specific context. Choronomy adds value, but often
in ways we do not yet understand. Janine Benyus counsels humility in the
face of how little we know about even small natural locations. ‘‘There are