In mathematics, well-behaved topological spaces can be localized at primes, in a similar way to the localization of a ring at a prime. This construction was described by Dennis Sullivan in 1970 lecture notes that were finally published in (Sullivan 2005).
The reason to do this was in line with an idea of making topology, more precisely algebraic topology, more geometric. Localization of a space X is a geometric form of the algebraic device of choosing 'coefficients' in order to simplify the algebra, in a given problem. Instead of that, the localization can be applied to the space X, directly, giving a second space Y.