Locality and localism: a view from British Human Geography

This paper considers the political geography of localism and reviews the insights of geographers regarding localism and locality. It identifies three main approaches to locality in Human Geography. Regional geographers, humanistic geographers and spatial scientists view localities as relatively natural phenomena. Marxist and political-economic geographers view localities as social phenomena produced by uneven capitalist development. Post-structuralist geographers view localities as characteristically open, plural and dynamic. The paper also distinguishes three sets of political localism to be found in human-geographical literatures. First, localism describes seemingly natural ways of life – organised to maximise authentic experiences of place in the case of Humanistic Geography and to minimise the friction of distance in the case of spatial science. Second, localism describes cultural–political expressions of spatial divisions of labour, including local political cultures, local proactivity in the context of large-scale economic restructuring, and actually existing, variegated, local neoliberalisations. Third, localism describes struggles to produce locally scaled action, including projects of local autonomy and self-sufficiency directed against the central state, movements to defend collective consumption from developers, coalitions to defend fixed capital against devaluation, and state downscaling to regulate capitalism. To illustrate their usefulness, some of these insights are applied to the localism agendas of recent British governments.