Summary
Cosmolocalism is a way of organising in which knowledge and designs are shared worldwide as a commons, while the physical making is done locally, near where things are needed. It was developed in the 2010s by writers around the P2P Foundation, among them Michel Bauwens, Vasilis Kostakis and José Ramos, drawing on older ideas of cosmopolitanism and relocalisation. One version is summed up as ‘design global, manufacture local’. For Ramos it happens when “easily accessible designs are paired with localized and distributed production capabilities”.
Indra Adnan, co-initiator of The Alternative UK, carries the word into politics: her platform builds what it calls cosmolocal ‘community agency networks’.
Rationale
Not a term our articles use. Its pattern does resemble our imagined portfolio: experiments rooted in particular places, with the learning “shared with others”. But cosmolocalism is about making things, not dispositions.