The Brooklynization of the planet

Now you can’t travel to the bottom of the South China Sea without first passing through “the Brooklyn of the Malacca Strait”…A preliminary list of places championed for (accused of?) “Brooklynizing” includes sections of Nashville, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Los Angeles, and somewhat more alarmingly, Paris, London, Stockholm and Berlin.

It means: small-batch production, urban husbandry, period facial hair, a fixed-gear bicycle, “Girls.” “Brooklynizing” is the exportation of these culture-pages clichés to fresh landmasses.

“Brooklynization”…represents a serious attempt at repudiation…of the logic of globalization, and its elevation of an international elite with no ostensible connection to either specific places or the making of physical things.