Before 1907, the two hamlets of Kinlochmore and Kinlochbeag had long subsisted as separate entities, each guarding opposite sides of the River Leven where it exits into Loch Leven to the east of the Scottish Highlands. It was in that year that the British Aluminum Company, attracted to the site for its abundance of two natural features – a mountainous topography and good water supply – elected to create an aluminum smelting plant at the head of the loch and, alongside it, a hydro electric station powered by a newly constructed dam, the Blackwater Reservoir. The local community thrived and the two residual hamlets came to form the town of Kinlochleven. The smelter employed 800 people and the population grew and over the course of a century prospered due to the presence of this one core industry.
In 1994, fluctuations in patterns of demand for aluminum as well as improvements in technology meant that the plant at Kinlochleven was no longer a viable prospect and so the throttling of production began. Unemployment, naturally, spiked and the local economy settled into a steep descent as what had become its sole driving force pulled back. Kinlochleven repeats what has now become familiar, across the earlier industrialised nations, as the natural trajectory of the one-industry town – Ponca City, Oklahoma, had since 1911 been enthrall to the Conoco Phillips Oil Company, but after major restructuring between 1993 and 2008 the company went from providing 50% of the city’s employment to just 7%; Akron, Ohio, once referred to as the ‘rubber capital of the world’, unsurprisingly faltered once the tire industry all but collapsed and tens of thousands of jobs were lost, followed in the ensuing decades by mass population exodus. Ponca City and Akron have since gone through painful, recuperative attempts at diversification, reseeding the skills leached out of the labour market by the gravitational force of the industrial units that had once promised long term, stable growth and employment. Kinlochleven, being of smaller stature and with less latent economic potential, has to rely on what it can draw from the tourist trade.
One-industry towns, in particular those that are based around processes of extracting or refining basic commodities, exist in something of a double negative bind. While, on the one hand, the nature of the employment they offer, increasingly mechanised, is for the most part either low skilled or specialised in such a way that they are not locally transferable, they are also completely exposed to the vagaries of a world market that can see an expensive industrial plant go from profit making to profit loosing in a frighteningly short space of time. It is this combination of an inflexible workforce tied into the most volatile of markets that can see entire communities left defunct.
As an interventionist design strategy targeted at such a circumstance, EASTLOCAL’s success is predicated on several fundamental decisions taken well before any specific project is planned. Chief amongst these is positioning. By taking a position neutral in respect to either Alcoa or the local population, EASTLOCAL avoids embedding itself within a dialogue that would automatically skew its output towards the didactic, conciliatory or reactionary. It operates with a null-memory, treating the situation objectively and as found, pitching its ideas towards the present, not adopting the history of competing factions. It asks ‘what if we’, not ‘what if we had’. If the project sees, at its crux, a discussion between forces of globalism and localism, suggesting that that discussion is not only possible but also vital, then that is achieved by removing another unnecessary divide, that so often placed between stances of pragmatism and idealism. It does not succumb to the moral outrage that circulated during the smelters planning and construction. Nor does it deny that moralism its validity by deriding those voices for their ‘provincialism’ or ‘whimsy’, unsupportable in the face of a global market and economic initiatives that benefit an entire nation but necessarily have to work at scale that ignores the local.
EASTLOCAL enters into this debate recognizing the benefits of both localism and globalisation for the regional community. One of the major benefits of being functionally neutral is that you can be truly community led in your response. Alcoa is now part of that grouping and, besides that, the original population could never be treated fairly as a uniform mass. After all (as at Kinlochleven) the Alcoa smelter has been a source of local prosperity, and the effected population is split fairly evenly in terms of their attitude towards it.
The point at which EASTLOCAL marks its real achievement, where that discussion between global and local forces is most clearly articulated, is not in the specific projects or the products developed from them (these are, non disparagingly, subsidiary achievements) but at a stage before that, in the way the raw aluminum rods from the smelter are introduced to local tradespeople. The trick is, again, in that moment of positioning. EASTLOCAL creates a narrative that places this material, quite simply, as newly discovered local resource. I say narrative because what is most important here is that angle of perception. When treated in this way it becomes obvious that the aluminum should be combined with the traditional craft products that have themselves grown out of the opportunistic manipulation of what is most easily to available.
Not only this, but combined in a manner suiting the natural pace and heuristic design process of vernacular production. The Alcoa plant and the aluminum it yields are just one node in an incomparably large and entirely discrete network that renders opaque the journey from sourcing materials to design to manufacturing. The simple act of removing it from the confines of the plant and using it untreated, almost as a ‘found’ object, transform the previously invisible and incongruent into something comprehensible and appropriate to a localized system in which sourcing, design and manufacturing occur, quite literally, in the hands of each tradesperson and where production arises in the same space as use.
One of the paradoxes of globalisation is that, as it has developed and its homogenising force spread, it has created the conditions for an increased interest in localised identities, making a higher currency of ‘differnce’, and the products thereof. In each individual case, the key has now become how to take advantage of this before those same forces distort local social and economic conditions so much as to make those identities unsustainable. EASTLOCAL has acted early and so provides a model that could prevent the sort of wide spread deskilling that has left communities such as Ponca City and Akron struggling, retroactively, to inject some plasticity back into their labour force. Crucially, what it offers the community in which it is embedded is a certain robustness, the potential to take some advantage from global flows of capital without being held ransom by them. It realises that the longest standing traditions have not remained static, but have evolved in order to secure their survival; EASTLOCAL provides the opportunity to preserve local trades via a process of design evolution. Its success lies in working with a present of which Alcoa is part but planning for a future from which it will undoubtedly fade.