Research note
"Practices do not travel, only elements do": locality, supply chains, and the Californian accent
A note for the “anti-local” tension in the Baltic Birch web-design idea, but the argument generalizes back to the thesis.
Shove and Pantzar’s doctrine is unusually crisp: “elements – which can and do travel – and practices, viewed as necessarily localized, necessarily situated instances of integration (which do not travel)” #PU3SNX p. 53). Restated on p. 58: “elements do seem to travel in ways that practices do not. As structured and situated arrangements, practices are always in the process of formation, re-formation and de-formation” #PWJ5NB And the methodological pay-off on p. 146: “what looks like the diffusion of practices-as-entities is better understood as a consequence of their re-enactment in multiple sites. In short, practices do not literally travel, but elements certainly do” #F6625X The companion phrase from the 2005 Nordic-walking paper is that practices are “homegrown” (Gurova quoting Shove and Pantzar 2005:43, #L5EYN6
The interesting case for testing this doctrine is the asymmetry between physical and digital practice. Baltic Birch as a furniture-making practice is held in place by a literal regional infrastructure: forests, mills (Latvijas Finieris and others), freight, warehouses with the weird thicknesses, carpenters who know what to ask for, café interiors that quietly accumulate the look. The transportation of materials genuinely shapes where the practice can take hold #ERLV22 on cast-iron stoves) — outside the Baltics the same plywood arrives as a premium import, expensive and special, and the casual everydayness of it doesn’t survive the journey. The artefact travels; the practice doesn’t.
Web design appears to invert this. There is no warehouse, no edge to inspect, no freight, no regional supply. Artefacts (npm packages, font files) arrive identically everywhere with one command. So one might expect digital practice to be genuinely placeless. But it isn’t — it’s deeply Californian. Material Design is the regional accent of a region that managed to globalize its substrate; it travels everywhere because the platforms it rides on travel everywhere, but its placelessness is a claim about the practice, not a property of it. The Californian accent passes itself off as the absence of accent; the Baltic accent calls itself by name.
The honest version of the practice-theoretic position, then: every practice is local, but some practices are local in localities that have managed to look like everywhere. The Baltic Birch design idea is interesting because it refuses the placelessness claim and forces the locality to be carried explicitly — not by the substrate (which is placeless) but by the carrier, the constraints encoded into the components, and the meanings the name imports.
For the thesis, this strengthens the framing already at work in #XN95VQ Brīvbode is not the local instance of a global “freecycling” practice but a situated coordination at one particular Riga site. You couldn’t open one in Berlin by copying the layout, any more than you could open a Latvian carpentry shop by importing a stack of plywood. The elements would arrive; the practice would have to be re-grown.