Bringing It All Back Home

Castells holds out hope that the the importance of physical place can persist in the face of the new techno-economic paradigm he terms "the space of flows" and says local societies and governments must systematically intrude their interests into the globalized system in order for that to happen. Let's talk about this in the context of Madison and the question of what local interests should ground, anchor, frame, guide, pick your own verb, this place's participation in the emerging global industrial space and economy. One place I would point to is the university and the human resources here who are plugged into national and transnational research projects and equally farflung funding sources but whose physical roots and lifestyle are here in Madison and also, possibly, a significant chunk of their social network, including key academic and professional ties. What other social actors here are similarly operating in both local, place-based space and transnational space at once?