Cosmolocalism

Definition

Cosmolocalism, also called cosmo-localism or cosmolocalization, is a mode of production that combines a globally shared design commons with locally performed manufacturing. Its shorthand is DGML, design global, manufacture local.

The organizing distinction is between what is light and what is heavy. Knowledge, design, and software are light, so they travel freely and belong to a global commons. Production and manufacturing are heavy, so they stay local. Vasilis Kostakis puts the same point directly: manufacturing is heavy and therefore local, information is light and therefore can come from anywhere.

There is no hierarchy running from global down to local in this arrangement. A local group takes whatever solutions it wants from the global commons, and is free to modify and contextualise them to fit local culture and structure.

Origin and terminology

The idea arrived from two directions.

Design theorists got there first, through cosmopolitan localism, a phrase associated with Ezio Manzini. His picture is a community held together by short-distance networks that build up the local economy and social fabric, with long-distance networks connecting that community to the rest of the world.

Peer production researchers arrived separately, from software. Vasilis Kostakis, Vasilis Niaros, George Dafermos, and Michel Bauwens set out the productive model in "Design Global, Manufacture Local," published in Futures in 2015. Their starting point was open-source software, and the question was what happens when the same practices are applied to physical objects. Peer-to-peer relationality is what makes localized manufacturing possible in this account. Open design distributed manufacturing is another name for the same thing.

Jose Ramos has done quite a lot of work of describing it as an economic model and connecting it to futures studies. Michel Bauwens, who founded the P2P Foundation, framed it as an economy in which communities use open-source designs, digital fabrication, and commons-based governance to reach self-sufficiency.

The full definition from the Dictionary of Cosmo Localisation describes the process of bringing together globally distributed knowledge and design commons with high-tech and low-tech capacity for localized production across a range of material goods, from food to tools to clothes to household and industrial products.

Preconditions

Two things have to be in place. The first is precision automated production available at local scale. The second is an open, globally peer-produced sphere of open knowledge.

The manufacturing side spans a wide technical range and is not confined to digital fabrication. The COSMOLOCALISM project's own scope runs from 3D printing and CNC machines to low-tech tools and crafts.

The commons

The system is built around a commons, meaning the social practices of creating and governing a resource through institutions that a community of producers or users creates and manages. These take forms ranging from co-management of natural resources such as fisheries and pastures to co-creation and co-management of digitally shared content.

The associated organizational proposal is open cooperativism, in which the literature identifies a three-zone structure: a productive community of members, users, and contributors who produce the commons, either paid or as volunteers, alongside further zones handling market interface and governance. Existing examples include Sensorica for hardware services and Enspiral for software. Bauwens and Kostakis propose that such cooperatives be backed by a partner state through taxation, regulation, and education.

The COSMOLOCALISM project

An EU-funded research project, grant 802512, running through 2023, based at TalTech in Estonia and led by Kostakis. Its aim was to document, analyze, test, and evaluate the emerging mode of production.

The team used the phrase cosmolocal production to describe how local communities may reduce reliance on global supply chains by shifting production to local settings, prioritising reciprocity and self-organisation, and promoting local independence, cultural diversity, and global benefits. Pilot projects ran in Greece and Bhutan. A central conclusion was that the cosmolocal approach redefines economic development by transcending the dichotomy between global and local.

The project was notably candid about its own subject. DGML appears to form economies of scope that promote sustainability and open innovation, but such claims rest on thin conceptual and empirical foundations, which is what the project set out to test.

Cases

Documented cases include wind turbines, prosthetic limbs, and satellites built from open-source guides, manufactured locally through makerspaces and fab labs. Kostakis has described commons-based design and manufacture in prosthetics and in agricultural machinery for small farms as the clearest examples.

Tzoumakers, a rural makerspace in the mountains of Epirus, Greece, producing agricultural tools with and for local small farmers, is the most studied single case, examined alongside P2P Lab.

Earlier work includes the Helix_T wind turbine project, studied by Kostakis, Fountouklis, and Drechsler in Science, Technology & Human Values in 2013.

Claimed advantages

The sustainability argument runs on the light and heavy split. Keeping heavy processes local minimises transport, while the light processes gain from being unrestricted physically. Kostakis adds that the model is not driven by competition, profit maximisation, or planned obsolescence, and that this rather than the technology is what makes it sustainable.

A design consequence follows that is worth stating plainly. A product designed to be manufactured in many places, by people who will also repair it, has to be documented, repairable, and buildable from available materials. Those constraints produce different objects than a design optimised for a single factory and a sealed enclosure.

Objections

Institutional reform is treated in the literature as a precondition rather than an accompaniment, meaning cosmolocalism cannot gain momentum without it.

Cosmolocal firms operating inside national borders remain exposed to regulatory scrutiny, and platform companies can remove them from the market by revoking hosting or undercutting them commercially.

The empirical base is also thin, by the admission of the research programme itself. Most documented cases are small, grant-supported, and concentrated in agriculture, prosthetics, and energy. Whether the model scales to goods requiring materials that only exist in concentrated supply chains, semiconductors above all, is unresolved.

Related Reading

• The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
• Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
• Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace
• Computer Lib
• The Future of the Internet - And How to Stop It
• Supercapitalism : The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life
• Against the Megamachine: Essays on Empire and its Enemies
• Myth of the Machine : Technics and Human Development
• What Technology Wants
• The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles
• Corporate Wasteland: The Landscape and Memory of Deindustrialization
• Material Culture and Technology in Everyday Life: Ethnographic Approaches
• Digital Ground: Architecture, Pervasive Computing, and Environment
• Equipotential Space: Freedom in Architecture
• Place: The Networking of Public Space

Key texts

• Kostakis, V., V. Niaros, G. Dafermos, and M. Bauwens. "Design Global, Manufacture Local: Exploring the Contours of an Emerging Productive Model." Futures 73 (2015): 126-135.
• Kostakis, V., K. Latoufis, M. Liarokapis, and M. Bauwens. "The Convergence of Digital Commons with Local Manufacturing from a Degrowth Perspective: Two Illustrative Cases." Journal of Cleaner Production 197 (2018): 1684-1693.
• Bauwens, M., V. Kostakis, and A. Pazaitis. Peer to Peer: The Commons Manifesto. University of Westminster Press, 2019.
• Kostakis, V., and M. Bauwens. Network Society and Future Scenarios for a Collaborative Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
• Manzini, Ezio. Design, When Everybody Designs. MIT Press, 2015.
• Ramos, Jose, ed. The Cosmolocal Reader. 2021.

External Links

• COSMOLOCALISM project, CORDIS
• P2P Foundation