Locality

Locality is another word for place. If one thinks of different possible scales, locality is nearby. Within geography, it has stood for the smallest political designation, the place where one lives, the area contained within narrow political borders. Often viewed as having an obvious meaning, it reemerged during the 1980s as a significant term for the local level when those working with a variety of new theoretical approaches undertook to redefine the relationship between space and place and their relation to political, economic, and cultural forces. The word locality offered an alternative to community as it emphasized linkage and change as opposed to community studies' greater association with traditional culture or embattled resistance.

British geographers such as Doreen Massey and the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies (CURS) projects were especially important in adding analytic juice to the word locality. Locality studies arose in Britain during the early 1980s in response to the massive changes transforming the British economy and society. Localities research developed as a critique and/or enrichment of structural analyses of economic redevelopment that tended to view processes at the global or regional level. Work done under the rubric of locality studies required a more finely grained analysis of the interaction between large-scale structural forces that drove economic restructuring worldwide and more locally based, historically layered social arrangements. Structural analyses, for example, explained how capitalism's globalization of manufacturing production led to the growth of textile plants in low-wage countries. They captured how the overall process led to plant closures and unemployment for industrial countries and their industrial workers. But the structural analyses often provided little understanding of why some places got the new plants and others did not or of which places could ward off closures and which would elude the threat entirely. Thus, the point of the localities approach was not only to understand the specifics of place but also to understand how the processes articulated across space in creating the world's highly differentiated set of arrangements and outcomes.

Each locality has its own confluence of forces, mix of businesses and business organization, capital available for investment, attractiveness to outside capital, labor force, culture, and openness to change and risk. Locality studies of the textile industry in Europe, for example, found clearly different local patterns that depended on materials (e.g., cotton vs. wool), ownership patterns (e.g., large-scale, international, centrally controlled structures vs. smaller, local-scale, guild-like structures), technology (highly mechanized vs. labor intensive), and labor force (e.g., wage differentials and gender).

Some industries are less mobile than others. Those that depend on place-specific natural resources, a workforce with very distinctive training, or especially costly plant and infrastructure conditions may find themselves highly committed to their locations. Other industries may be relatively footloose, with requirements easily met in a number of places. These variations influence the locality, but localities are not merely passive responders to the industries' decisions. They mobilize their own forces in representing their attributes and in changing them.

Governments are instrumental in creating each set of local conditions. For example, particular choices in[Page 284] governmental regulation and governmental investment generate local transportation and communication advantages for some places—easy interstate highway access, guaranteed airline service, inexpensive broadband Internet availability, and so on—while marginalizing others. Differences in educational standards can mean the difference between a workforce that is technically trained and one that is not. Each locality exists within its own set governments operating at various scales. These interact—sometimes intentionally and sometimes inadvertently. Funding for particular projects, for example, may be authorized at one level and distributed at another level. For those living within a locality, the multiple governmental forms are an integral and sometimes unquestioned part of life. Yet formal arrangements are highly variable. For example, in strong home rule states, each locality has its own school district; in others, the locality has few formal powers and the county is responsible for education.

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