New localities in action and reaction

This book has been about the WISERD locality research programme, which has operated in the context of a devolved Wales. The spatial backdrop has initially been the Wales Spatial Plan (WSP) and its fuzzy boundaries, and more recently notions of ‘spatial complexity’ associated with the Williams Commission on Public Governance and Delivery. As detailed in Chapter 2, the WSP provided a temporary spatial fix for developing a devolved Wales and a means of instructing regions how to behave economically and culturally in terms of mobility, movement and connection. The ‘new localities’ approach to spatial development has challenged simplistic understandings of regions based on drawing lines on maps and suggesting that governance complexity can be simplified by merely introducing coterminosity; instead our approach has focused attention on processes of ‘locality-making’, or the ways in which semi-stabilised and popularly recognised representations of locality are brought into being through the moulding, manipulation and sedimentation of space within ongoing social, economic and political struggles.