ABSTRACT
Questions of scale have always been fundamental to the study of human geography, with many of the key concepts in the discipline intended to divide the world up into manageable units for the purposes of analytical convenience. On this basis, geographers have invoked a variety of territorial units which serve to guide research and pedagogy, such as the neighbourhood, the city, the locale, the region, the nation state and so on. What is particularly important about these concepts is that they are regarded as being nested in one another like a Russian matryoshka doll: the neighbourhood is in the city, the city is in the region, the region is in the nation and so on.The idea that social and economic processes operate in different but related ways at different scales has hence constituted a keystone of geographical inquiry.
