The Locality

The older, plainer name for the scales between the Microlocality and the Ecoregion — the locality and the city.

Some canon pages climb the ladder as Village → Microlocality → Community → Locality (~100,000) → City or Major Population Centre (~1,000,000) → Ecoregion. Others name the same two rungs Mediolocality and Macrolocality. The rungs are identical in size and function; only the words differ, and both sets are in live use (Levels Of Scale).

Keeping the plain words is worth something. Locality and city are what people actually say, and a ladder that can only be climbed in coined vocabulary will not be climbed by anyone who has not read the book. The Latin-built names earn their place where precision matters — in a table of magnitudes, where city means five different sizes depending on the country — and the plain ones earn theirs at the door (On translating, A Word on Words).

Read them as one rung with two names, and prefer whichever your table will use without flinching. What is said of the scale holds either way: a federation of the bodies beneath it, sovereign, consent-based, holding the shared services those bodies cannot carry alone (Subsidiarity, Shared Services, Infrastructure, and Support).

Also called: The City Stands on: Levels Of Scale · Community Opens onto: The Mediolocality · The Macrolocality · The Macrocomplex · Ecoregion · A Word on Words In play: beyond the table Sources: The LIØNSBERG Pattern Language, From Circle To Cosmos (draft) · Neighborhood Card, the ladder as it names the rungs (draft) · Levels of Scale (canon-grade) · lionsberg.wiki: Levels of Scale Open: Two live vocabularies for the same two rungs — Locality · City and Mediolocality · Macrolocality. Unresolved.