ABSTRACT
The current situation of community has been greatly transformed by globalization. While globalization has fragmented many forms of local community, it has led to the reinvention of others. Some of the most pervasive expressions of community today are transnational. As we saw in Chapter 4, Manuel Castells argues that many urban social movements have been greatly empowered by globalization, one dimension of which is so-called ‘glocalization’ – the mixing of the local and the global.1 ‘We are not living in a global village, but in customized cottages globally produced and locally distributed’ (Castells, 1996, p. 341). Globalization does not operate top-down, but can provide new political, economic and cultural opportunities for locally-based groups to reinvent themselves. The local-global nexus is particularly interesting with regard to new expressions of community.
