ABSTRACT
This chapter explores 'choice', articulated as a personal capacity and contrasted with place-based pragmatism. The various classed-gendered-generational 'cares' within such landscapes suggest a complex geography of choice which embeds rather than dismantles inequality. Choice always involves selection and exclusion, yet it is frequently valorised as agentic, even alternative and non-conformist, counterposed to the local, as stuck, fixed and traditional: within such moves middle-class practices and identities are capacitated as 'coming forward' as against those rooted to place. The transcripts of the working-class interviewees often conveyed a localism as material constraints often meant they were operating within limited spaces. Rather than understanding these orientations entirely as 'loss' and 'lack' they can be understood as resistant investments: in mediating dislocation, working-class geographies involve a place-based pragmatism. Choice was associated with opportunity, illustrating the materiality of decision-making capacities, as areas were marked as offering or constraining prospects.
