Academic Context

‘Locality’, like the equally ambiguous word ‘region’ before it, has been a heavily debated ‘key word’ in geography and the social sciences more broadly.  Localities in the sense of autonomous sub-national social units rarely exist, and it is also misleading to use locality as a synonym for place or spatial variation. Locality provides a way of ‘framing’ social-spatial relations, in order to chart how geography is both imagined and experienced. Localities can be windows on, and bundles of, four distinct geographical concerns (recently coined ‘TPSN’): territories (borders and boundaries), places (individual and individualised social relations), scales (gestalt constructions), and networks (stretched out and perforated relations). 

For locality to have analytical value it must have both a ‘material coherence’ and an ‘imagined coherence’. Material coherence refers to the social, economic and political structures and practices that are uniquely configured. Imagined coherence implies that stakeholders and residents of the locality have a sense of identity with the place and with each other, such that they constitute a perceived community with shared patterns of behaviour and shared geographical reference points. Both material coherence and imagined coherence are also important in fixing the scale at which localities can be identified.  As such, whilst the locality research in WISERD is spatially-focused, it is not to be spatially-constrained, but prepared to follow networks and relations across scales and spaces in order to reveal the full panoply of forces and actors engaged in the constitution of the locality.