The Journey
We spent two years (through a pandemic!) looking for the best examples and ideas we could find.
We reached out to researchers and frontline social innovators from around the world. We gathered example cases and essays, both not previously published and exemplary examples to republish.
Inclusive
The Reader includes diverse framings, which provide space to explore the ideas from a number of perspectives. Instead of locking down and defining cosmolocalism, it provides a space to explore and create the future of it. Different framings include: Design Global Manufacture Local, Open Design Distributed Manufacturing, Maker Cities, Fab Cities, Do-It-Together, Planetary Bricolage, Cosmopolitan Localism, Peer-to-Peer Production, Commons and other ways of understanding our emerging potentials.
Critical
The Reader is a call for transformation, bold thinking and action.
Our challenges are unprecedented, and the solutions of the past will not solve the problems of the present and future. The essays and examples in the Reader invite us to rethinking our political systems, economies and cultures, and use the collective intelligence and creativity of humanity to address the issues that matter.
Editorial Team
José Ramos
Co-editor
Sharon Ede
Co-editor
Michel Bauwens
Co-editor
James (Gien) Wong
Co-editor
Abril Chimal
Production Editor
The Cosmolocal Reader features 50 chapters documenting and discussing theory and practice. From modular automotive manufacturing, to agri-robotics and peer to peer farming, community driven wind power and housing construction… to biohacking, furniture fabrication, upcycling, prosthetics, and disaster relief, over 40 cases and examples from around the world provide a foundation to consider what exists and what could be, and 12 essays provide thought provoking ideas, reflections, critique and imagination.
Cosmolocalism stands for a transformation in how we produce the stuff of life. It is a contested space with no guarantees. There are patent wars and appropriations of IP, the challenges in building and financing open source and open design start ups, creating urban commons ecosystems, and a variety of other challenges. But we see possibilities bubbling through the surface. And, the challenges we are facing are asking for bold and transformative thinking and strategy. Today we also hold new technological potentials, creative human labor that can be mutualised, and new modes of economic, political and cultural organisation. The ingredients for change are sitting before us. In this book we bring many of these ingredients together for us to consider how we use these to shape the world we want to become.