What is local culture?

Hune Margulies, Ph.D

In Space and Culture: The Case For Land Rights


"Local culture is a function of a local community in a local space. From an urbanist's perspective, the key element is the localization of culture, culture as it crystallizes and develops at the level of the neighborhood and the region. Culture and space are inherently connected. Culture, being a social category, requires a community to be its bearer, and the community requires a space in which to interact. It is from the interaction between members of a community within the bounds of a territory they share, that the process of local culture creation and reproduction gets under way. Local cultures emerge in the context of a deep and multifarious connection between a community and the local territory they inhabit. Likewise, community emerges in the context of a space imbued with its unique culture. In order to create a local culture, a local space must be demarcated. In addition, only local cultures are small enough to emerge in the context of relatively more intimate communities. Intimacy, which requires face-to-face, walking-distance type communities, is one of the foundations of the intentional society.

In order to create a group culture, any common culture, not just "ethnic" ones, space is a prerequisite. Culture is used here in its anthropological, life-style, definition. Culture, as a social construct, emerges in the context of a given period of a community's life, a process of evolution and interaction within and with its own space. A people cut off from its territorial and administrative continuity, whether through colonial domination, exile, or a combination thereof, will experience loss and irreparable damage in terms of its ancestral culture.

Only a community can create a culture and only a culture provides the shared identity underlying community. In traditional terms, local cultures were known as ethnic cultures. In modern terms, we can talk about regional diversity and the richness it brings to the larger society. We also talk about new ethnicities. New ethnicities are the creation of the pluralistic, large city. These new forms of ethnicity are formed on the basis of cultural affinities in local spaces. There is no ancestral blood-lineage to these new ethnicities, there is instead an identifiable cultural (and class) affinity and its territorial component."