Developing a comprehensive understanding of the varied and complex processes associated with the formation of massive stars requires connecting a wide range of environments and physical size scales from galactic disks down to individual massive sources. Combining large scale surveys of our galactic plane with the sub-arcsecond images in the millimetre and sub-millimetre which ALMA now routinely produces, in principle allow us to map the flow of material from galactic environments through clouds to protostars. Increasingly these observations probe not only the structure and kinematics of regions, but also their chemistry and magnetic fields. Wide field surveys also help to place massive star formation in the wider context of the environment of our galaxy as well as other, more extreme, galaxies.
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