ABSTRACT
Social sciences and humanities are frequently concerned with the “local,” both as a unit of analysis for the in-depth investigation of macro-level phenomena and as a research subject in and of itself. Traditionally, geography has been the discipline most prominently concerned with the characteristics and shapes of places. Locality is often associated with “place.” Intuitive and commonplace understandings of local places relate to their role in people’s everyday lives, thriving on co-presences, frequent meetings and interactions, and a shared feeling of belonging. Globalization and “space-time compression” have served as important catalysts for the debate on locality, in that the flow of goods, information, and people has been ascribed the potential to dissolve socio-spatial boundaries on the global, national, and local scale in interweaving processes of de- and reterritorialization. The conceptualization of the local is closely related to the conceptualization of boundaries.
