'Scale' is a central concept in Geography with a complex history.
The meaning and function of scale have been debated by human geographers, especially since the 1980s.
Key questions:
How should we think about and research scale?
Do scales exist in a vertical or horizontal sense?
What scales are significant and most worthy of study?
What scales are overlooked?
Is scale something that exists "naturally" or is it something we have socially imagined?
How does the concept of scale shape or constrain our understanding of social processes and politics?
Is human geography better off without scale?
Scale is a useful entry point for understanding the recent history of human geography and the significance of philosophical and theoretical positions.
Early Approaches to Scale
Scale is derived from the Latin "scalae," meaning ladder or rung.
In the 1970s, scale was understood as a hierarchy over space.
Geographers focused on scales like 'the national' or 'the local' to examine phenomena, without questioning the nature of scale.
Approaches stemmed from Immanuel Kant's work.
Space, time, and scale were considered mental constructs shaping our understanding of the world, not 'real' material things.
Scale was treated as hard-wired into our minds.
The early 1980s marked a shift towards a more critical interpretation.
Peter Taylor (1982) argued that scales are produced under capitalism.
Taylor extended Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems theory, adding a spatial accent.
Three scales with different prime roles in the world economy:
Global scale: the 'scale of reality,' all-embracing and unavoidable.
National scale: the 'scale of ideology,' where nationalism and patriotism develop.
Urban scale: the 'scale of experience,' where we live our lives.
Neil Smith and Uneven Development
Neil Smith is credited with revolutionizing approaches to scale.
Smith, a Marxist geographer, studied how uneven geographical development occurs.
Scales are produced and can be understood by considering their roots, ends, and nature, providing insight into uneven development under capitalism.
Capitalism is organized as a multi-scale system that attempts to 'fix' capital in certain locations.
The urban, national, and global scales are where uneven development can be observed.
This prompted Marxist geographers to investigate the political economy of how scales are shaped and how their role changes over space and time.
The Politics and Social Construction of Scale
Smith felt early theorizations were too 'wooden'.
In the early 1990s, he coined 'the politics of scale' to move beyond capitalism and consider scale in relation to power and struggles.
Smith's work focused on resistance to gentrification by the homeless community in Manhattan's Lower East Side.
New York City's strategy:
Crack down on drugs.
'Clean up' parks used by the homeless population.
Tompkins Square Park: A 1 a.m. curfew was imposed to 'take back control' from predominantly African-American and Latino homeless residents.
Groups organized against the curfew, with solidarity squats appearing with 'Tompkins Square Everywhere' as their slogan.
Scale in the struggle to gain control of space: The struggle initially focused on the park but 'jumped scale' to become a neighborhood-wide concern.
The politics of scale captures how scale can 'contain and control' events and people and how scales can be claimed, redefined, and transformed.
Scholars focused on processes through which scales were redefined:
Scale jumping: Moving a political issue to a different scale to gain a wider audience or more leverage.
Scale bending: Challenging assumptions about which activities belong at which scales.
Glocalization: Restructuring from the national scale in both upwards (global) and downwards (local) directions simultaneously (e.g., McDonald's adjusting its menu according to local cultural contexts, such as removing beef in India).
Scale was accepted as 'a way of framing conceptions of reality' rather than 'an external fact awaiting discovery'.
There was 'nothing ontologically given' about scale.
Ontology: Refers to attempts to reason what existence is; to grapple with what the building blocks of reality are.
Scale is a social construction with real and tangible material consequences on everyday life.
The 1990s literature was preoccupied with capitalism and the state, overlooking other scales.
Sallie Marston (2000) drew attention to the oversight of the household scale and unequal distribution of power and resources based on sex and gender.
Urban middle-class women in the USA embarked upon a politics of scale as they extended their influence beyond the home.
Neil Brenner argued for 'a more precise and hence analytically narrower conception of geographical scale', limiting the definition of scale to 'relations of hierarchization and rehierarchization among vertically differentiated spatial units'.
Competing Imaginaries of Scale
Scale has been conceptualized in different ways, drawing upon different imaginaries.
Metaphors are central to our understandings of scale.
Three metaphors:
The ladder: Implies verticality, hierarchy, and power (scales 'higher up' can surveil scales beneath them).
Concentric circles: Local scales are enclosed and encompassed by 'larger' scales, connoting a more horizontal understanding.
Matryoshka dolls: Suggests that scales can be nested, forming a rigid progression.
Howitt (1998) offered a contrasting metaphor: musical scales, rejecting nested and hierarchical understandings and arguing for a more relational interpretation.
Changing geographical scale alters the relationships between elements.
Howitt's intervention was an earlier glimmer of a wider 'relational turn' in human geography.
Relational thinking: Focuses on connectivity and sees the world as woven together through connections.
Rejection of 'absolute' understandings of space (Euclidean approaches).
Space is constantly remade and can only be understood in relation to other things.
Space, politics, and place are 'encountered, performed, and fluid'.
This disrupts Euclidean, bounded, and hierarchical understandings.
Common metaphors:
Network: Relations as intersecting and interconnected lines.
Rhizome.
Kevin Cox (1998) adopted a networked approach, arguing that scales emerge out of relations connecting different actors and spaces to avoid 'discrete arenas'.
Alan Latham (2002) made a network-based intervention and termed it a 'topological' approach to scale, drawing upon actor-network theory.
Topological approaches: Express scale using lines and nodes and do not enclose absolute space.
Latham (2002) sought to highlight how places can be both global and local and to emphasize how social structure and hierarchy are built and maintained through complex assemblages.
The rhizome is a non-hierarchical, relational, and topological approach.
Derived from Deleuze and Guattari (1987), who critique 'vertical, tree-like' modes of thinking.
Objects and ideas can 'link up in non-hierarchical patterns of association'.
Human Geography With or Without Scale?
Katherine Jones (1998) argued for approaching scale as a contested representational device and an epistemology (a way of understanding the world).
Assuming scales to be ontological leads to uncritically treating them as 'that just is' and failing to analyze the effects of how scales are deployed to represent various spatial processes and activities.
Scholars adopted the idea of 'scale as epistemology', treating scale as a representational or discursive device, often taking the form of more horizontal, networked-based approaches.
Scale frames are seen as 'always emergent' and capable of shifting 'sociospatial boundaries and relations' and are practice-based understandings of how scale is represented and invoked rather than analyzing 'existing scales'.
Practice-based perspectives take issue with scholarship that sees socially constructed scales as 'inherited', considering this to be granting a problematic 'ontological priority to scales themselves'.
The question of when we are ontologizing scale and how this limits our understanding of political and social processes became a central concern.
Robert Kaiser and Elena Nikiforova (2008) argue for more focus on (i) the historical study of how our shared understandings of scale come into being and (ii) the performative effects of scale.
Marston, Jones III, and Woodward (2005) titled their paper 'Human Geography without Scale', deeming the concept to be 'chaotic'.
Networked approaches replace 'one ontological-epistemological nexus (verticality) with another (horizontality)'.
Including scale in human geography ultimately provided more unhelpful distraction than interpretive utility; scale was seen as an ontological 'predetermination' narrowing opportunities for understanding political alternatives.
Marston et al. (2005) proposed a 'flat' or site-based ontology, informed by actor-network theory, focusing on the unfolding set of relations with a focus on 'specific social sites of interaction'.
This approach can better attend to practices and processes occurring on the ground and enable geographers to deconstruct representational tropes such as scale without ontologizing or otherwise reifying them.
Some welcomed this intervention, while others defended the concept entirely.
Leitner and Miller (2007) suggested that it is necessary to take stock of pre-existing scales if we are to develop strategies of resistance.
Smith himself argued that flat approaches overlook our existing understandings of scale, amounting to 'wishful thinking'.
Kaiser and Nikiforova (2008) suggest that abolishing notions of scale only reinforces existing unequal power relations.
Moore (2008) suggests avoiding treating scale as a 'category of analysis' and instead focusing on how scalar ideas become embedded 'in consciousness and practice'.
Mackinnon (2010) suggests that scholarship is rarely squarely 'about' scale, so he advocates 'scalar politics' to capture this, also advocating a vision of 'scalar structures' as both inherited and contested.
Blakey (2021) suggests that there can be no 'one-size fits all solution' to the scale debate because how scholars approach it depends on their philosophical positions.
Drawing upon Jacques Rancière, Blakey (2021) suggests that scale is a 'common sense' idea that we share that affects how we make sense of the world; to avoid reifying or presupposing an understanding of scale, we should instead focus on moments of dissensus.
Scale offers a fascinating window into the various twists and turns of the discipline since the 1980s, and today's divisions mark the vibrancy of perspectives in contemporary human geography.
Different understandings of scale allow us to trace the dominance of Marxist political economy in the late 1980s, the influx of feminist and post-structural insights in the 1990s, and the relational turn as the discipline approached the millennium.
Marston et al.'s (2005) Human Geography without Scale was one antecedent to non-representational thinking, which has since gained much traction in cultural geography.
Scale remains a fascinating, albeit occasionally divisive, concept within the discipline.