ABSTRACT
It is by now widely recognised that development in and of particular places can only be understood by setting them in a wider (global) context (see Cooke 1990; Massey 1995). Such a starting-point may appear to be little more than common sense, but it is important, not least because it undermines approaches which imply that the world is constituted merely as the aggregate of a series of static and bounded ‘localities’ or even ‘communities’. Much locality-based research has found it difficult to move beyond the geographical boundaries which it uses to define its objects of study. So, for example, despite Cooke’s attempt to escape from such a framework in his introductory chapter, this seemed to be the message of the case studies arising from the ESRC’s Changing Urban and Regional System research programme, which were reported in Cooke (1989) and Harloe, Pickvance and Urry (1989). Although the case studies are of interest in themselves, the links between them are limited, and each seems almost hermetically sealed from the outside world (despite the inclusion of broad statements which acknowledge the importance of world-wide economic restructuring).
