The ‘McDonaldisation’ of the world, this is how the American sociologist George Ritzer described the effects of globalisation in 2000. We can buy the same burger in Tokyo, Dubai, Rome, New York and in Eindhoven. But why would a Japanese, with his vast culinary tradition, want a burger? Why would an Italian, who has superb restaurants around each corner, crave for a Happy McDonald Meal that was invented in America? Globalisation has come with a price.In the last decades we have witnessed how the world has become what is often called ‘a global village’. The media expert Marshall McLuhan invented the expression in 1964 (The Gutenberg Galaxy), describing the trend of mass media that were taking away more and more the boundaries of time and place in human communication on a global scale. It started with the invention of telephone, but most of all the development of the World Wide Web (www) transformed the world into a small village in which we can discard the notion of distance. However, not only through the improved means of global communication through Internet and telephone have we become the inhabitants of a small village. Also the physical boundaries between states and continents are being challenged. The means of transportation of people and goods have become easy, cheap and efficient. Within 6 hours we fly from Amsterdam to New York, it takes 11 hours from Amsterdam to Tokyo, 12 hours to go from London to Cape Town. Also the transportation of large amounts of physical goods, machines, products and foods, by trucks and ships has become easy, cheap and efficient. All the inventions that have made possible fast communication and fast transportation have changed the economic system worldwide. Why work with expensive labourers in Western Europe, if within a reasonable time you can have your goods manufactured in the workshops of India and China, where the costs of labour are so much lower. After manufacturing,

the cheap goods can be shipped to Europe or America and sold for profitable prices. Why eat strawberries in Holland only in Summer time, when the weather is good enough to have the fruit grow? In Egypt the fruit can grow all year and by plane we can have it in Eindhoven within a few hours. And why have your industry at a fixed place in your home country if you can easily move it to Africa, accomplish all you need over there and then sell your products for high prices back home and wherever you like to conquer the market. All this trading, of which this text only gives a tiny idea, has developed into a very complex system, into complex logistics and complex consequences. George Ritzer used McDonald as a metaphor to describe the consequences of the development of consumerist society worldwide. Because consumerism demands that goods are being produced, transported and consumed as fast and cheap as possible, the global market is focussed on efficiency, predictability, calculability and control through technology. This demand has lead to a rationalisation of global production, a standardisation of the products that are being produced and uniformity in the shops that sell them. Anywhere in the world we can buy exactly the same kind of goods. A burger tastes exactly the same in Moscow, in New York and in Tokyo. No matter whether a dress is designed in Belgium or South-Africa and then manufactured in India, or whether an American engineer mailed his sketches of a machine to a factory in China: the results can be bought everywhere in the world and are carrying less and less the marks of the places where they were designed and the places where they were manufactured.This development has had many consequences. Rationalised production but also the packaging and transportation of goods all over the world has detrimental effects on the natural environment, as it produces greenhouse gases that threaten to ruin the

planet. There are more effects of globalisation and the rationalisation of production: In Europe many traditional crafts have suffered from the worldwide trade of goods. For example: because ceramics can be manufactured cheaper in China, the traditional workshops in Holland have almost all disappeared (a good exception is Tichelaar in the North of Holland). While many of the original Dutch designs are now being manufactured overseas, some of the qualities might suffer from this large gap between the place where the design was made and the place where the production takes place. Historical meanings of forms and decoration, local materials and craft techniques, they all might gradually loose their quality if the production takes place by companies at the other side of the world. Special skills might disappear, symbolic meanings might fade and knowledge might diminish. On many levels counter movements are raising their voices. Apart from the need to produce more sustainable products to counter the detrimental effects on the environment, people start to feel a growing need for local qualities. A globalised world is in need of locality.-text by Louise Schouwenberg