Scale

Andrew Herod

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781134273874
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences physiques
• Subtopic: Géographie

Geographical scale is a central concept enabling us to make sense of the world we inhabit. Amongst other things, it allows us to declare one event or process a national one and another a global or regional one. However, geographical scales and how we think about them are profoundly contested, and the spatial resolution at which social processes take place – local, regional or global – together with how we talk about them has significant implications for understanding our world.

Scale provides a structured investigation of the debates concerning the concept of scale and how various geographical scales have been thought about within critical social theory. Specifically, the author examines how the scales of the body, the urban, the regional, the national, and the global have been conceptualized within Geography and the social sciences more broadly. The first part of the book provides a comprehensive overview of how different theoretical perspectives have regarded scale, especially debates over whether scales are real things or merely mental contrivances and/ or logical devices with which to think, as well as the consequences of thinking of them in areal versus in networked terms. The subsequent five chapters of the book then each takes a particular scale: the body; the urban; the regional; the national; the global and explores how it has been conceptualized and represented discursively for political and other purposes. A brief conclusion draws the book together by posing a number of questions about scale which emerge from the foregoing discussion.

The first single-author volume ever written on the subject of geographical scale, this book provides a unique overview in pushing understandings of scale in new and original directions. The accessible text is complimented by didactic boxes, and Scale serves as a valuable pedagogical reference for undergraduate and postgraduate audiences wishing to become familiar with such theoretical issues.

1
WHAT IS SCALE AND HOW DO WE THINK ABOUT IT?

Main entry: Scale

Function: Noun

Etymology: Middle English, from Late Latin scala ladder, staircase, from Latin scalae, plural, stairs, rungs, ladder; akin to Latin scandere to climb.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary

The question of scale and of level implies a multiplicity of scales and levels.

Henri Lefevbre (quoted in Brenner 1997: 135)

If the recent explosion of writing on globalization is any indication, matters of scale and the supposed rescaling of social life are on the intel-lectual agenda in Geography and other disciplines in a big way. Perhaps this is nowhere more evident than in discussions of globalization. Thus, although the myriad interpretations of globalization are quite dif-fer ent in many ways, by and large they share one overriding similarity: they argue that the contemporary economic, political, cultural, and social processes that are taken to be emblematic of globalization are rescaling people’s everyday lives and identities across the planet in complex and contradictory ways and are generally undermining other scales of social life, cultural identity, and economic and political sovereignty (see Herod 2009). Hence, much has been made of how globalization is supposedly leading to a weakening of national sovereignty, as national-level govern-ment powers are reassigned to supranational entities such as the European Union and to subnational levels of government. Likewise, many have argued that local communities’ power to resist “globally organized” capital’s predations has been undercut as globalization has unfolded.

Conversely, whereas many have argued that globalization heralds the evisceration and colonization of scales such as the local, some have suggested that the global’s increasing power is bringing with it not the undermining of the local but, perhaps paradoxically, its reassertion. Hence, Barber (2001) contends that globalization and localization are dialectically related processes – the more the forces of cultural homo-genization spread across the planet through the export of, primarily, US popular culture, the more people in various parts of the planet seek to express their differences as a way of maintaining their local cultural identities. Simultaneously, others have explored how cultural practices have supposedly become increasingly hybridized or glocalized, as when a “global corporation” such as McDonald’s adapts its menu to take local tastes into consideration.

Such arguments raise interesting questions about the gestalt of scale (i.e., how various scales fit together into a coherent whole), including: what is the relationship between “local” processes and “global” ones? what is the relationship between “local” forms and “global” processes, and vice versa? and, is “the global” simply the sum of all things “local,” or is there a degree of synergism, such that “the global” is, in fact, more than the totality of everything “local”? (For an exploration of how such questions play out with regard to language, see Box 1.1.) In light of such questions, in this chapter I explore two sets of issues concerning geographical scale and how it is conceptualized. First, I examine arguments concerning scale’s ontological status – that is, debates about whether scales really exist or not. I also outline how the corpus of writing on matters scalar developed historically within Geography. Second, I consider how various scalar metaphors have been used within Geography and beyond, and with what implications. The exploration of these two sets of issues then serves as the basis for the discussion of a number of separate scales in the remainder of the book.

Box 1.1 WHAT MAKES A LANGUAGE “GLOBAL”?

Thinking about how various languages are described raises interesting questions concerning matters of geographical scale. For instance, what does it mean to say that English is a “global language”? Does it mean that it is a very commonly spoken language? If so, then it falls far behind Mandarin Chinese, which is spoken by more people but tends not to be considered “global” in quite the same way. Does it mean that it is spoken in parts of the globe beyond its country of origin? If so, then might we also consider Yoruba and Quechua “global languages,” since both are spoken by individuals living across the globe, especially in communities with large numbers of immigrants from Nigeria and Peru? If not, then what makes English a “global language” and these others “local” or “regional” languages? Is it simply that a traveler is more likely to find someone with a passing familiarity with English than with these other languages when traveling? If so, presumably this would vary by their geographic location – a visitor to certain parts of Latin America and the Caribbean (where varieties of Yoruba are spoken amongst diasporic commun-ities) or to a Peruvian immigrant community in, say, Los Angeles may find Yoruba and Quechua more useful than English. Equally, how do the geographically specific and linguistically quite distinct varieties of “national” Englishes – British English, American English, Canadian English, Australian English, New Zealand English, Indian English, Nigerian English, Jamaican English, South African English, Singa-porean English, and the myriad Englishes spoken in other parts of the world – meld together to form a “global English”? Is “global English” merely the sum of its constituent “national” parts and, if so, what happens when different varieties come into conflict with one another over word usage, pronunciation, and grammatical syntax?

Furthermore, in what ways is it even possible to speak of “national” Englishes such as “British English” or “American English” when in both countries there are noticeable local variations in lexical practice, intonation, and sentence structure? Thus, if we are to ask how various “national Englishes” come together to form a “global English,” then we should probably also ask how various local or regional Englishes come together to form, say, “British English” – in other words, what is the relationship between “local” or “regional” Englishes and

a “national” English? Moreover, given how certain localities’ variants of English dominate what is considered their “national” English, what does this mean for how particular varieties of “local” English from specific regions of any English-speaking country may come to dominate “global” English? In the case of British English, for instance, it is historically the English from the southeast which has dominated the national variant but which has also been the basis for many other “national” Englishes – Australian English, for instance, largely derives from the working-class London English of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, given that convicts from this part of Britain numerically dominated those transported to Australia. Rather than thinking, then, that “national” English represents some kind of geographical average of all the local or regional Englishes spoken within a country and that one moves up a kind of linguistic spatial hierarchy from “local” English through a largely geographically homogeneous “national” English to “global” English, in fact much of the English that is taken globally to be representative of, say, “national” British English is from quite specific parts of Britain. Hence, rather than a linguistic hierarchy that links the local, through the national, to the global, it is possible to imagine a hierarchy in which the national is largely bypassed and the English spoken locally in the southeast of Britain has historically dominated much of the English spoken globally.

Equally, we might ponder how particular words from other languages and localities are transmitted spatially and incorporated into a local or national variant of English before becoming differentially rebroadcast globally – the words shufti (slang in parts of Britain for “a quick look”) and shampoowere both introduced into British English by soldiers returning from the Middle East and India, but whereas shampoo is commonly understood by most speakers of English worldwide, the fact that shufti is unlikely to be known much outside Britain tells us something about the spatiality of word loans and language projection globally. Likewise, the term boonies (short for boondocks, meaning “in the middle of nowhere”) was introduced into American English during the US occupation of the Philippines and was derived from the Tagalog word bundok(“a mountain”). As such,

it is commonly understood by most Americans but would probably be unfamiliar to most English speakers outside either the Philippines or the US. The fact that some borrowed words become part of the “global” language whereas others remain largely national or even local in their usage in the adopting language, then, raises interesting questions about the geography of language and, in this case, its scaling.

Finally, the nationalization of certain local varieties of a language to form a “national standard” can sometimes be organic and can sometimes be planned through the intervention of the national state, a fact that has important scalar implications. Thus, in the case of Italian, the Tuscan dialect was selected by the government after unification to serve as the basis for standard Italian, largely because Florence was a center of the Renaissance and the 1582 founding place of the Accademia della Crusca, which had published early Italian dictionaries (see Bertinetto and Loporcaro 2005). In this instance, then, a particular local area’s language variant was elevated quite consciously to the national stage. In other instances, national lingua francas emerge organically, as an amalgam of various different local/regional languages or dialects that may then subsequently be formally adopted by governments as “national languages.”

ON SCALE’S ONTOLOGICAL STATUS

Early interventions

Scale has long been one of Geography’s core concepts. Nonetheless, prior to the 1980s – and despite some efforts in the early twentieth century to examine critically the constitution of scales such as “the urban” and “the regional” (see Chapters 3 and 4) – scale was largely a taken-for-granted concept used for imposing organizational order on the world. Whereas both physical and human geographers – as well as many other natural and social scientists – had frequently employed scales such as “the regional” or “the national” as frames for their research projects, looking at particular issues from, say, a “regional scale” or a “national scale,” they had generally spent little time theorizing the nature of scale itself. Rather, researchers typically had simply imagined the world as inherently hierarchically compartmentalized, with scales such as “the regional,” “the national,” and “the global” conceptualized as natural geographical units/ spatial echelons (from the French échelon [rung of a ladder], which itself comes from échelle, meaning both “a ladder” and “scale”), as simply the most logical way in which to carve the world up into manageable pieces for the purposes of analysis, or as no more than handy mental contrivances for ordering the world. To all intents and purposes, though, in such approaches scales were seen simply as tools for geographically circumscribing “a relatively closed … system, the majority of whose interactions remain within its boundaries” (Johnston 1973: 14) – they were viewed as what Lefebvre (1974/1991: 351) evocatively termed “space envelopes.”

Generally, such approaches drew upon the conceptual approach out-lined by eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1781/ 2007). Whereas Isaac Newton (1687/1999) had viewed time and space as real and absolute things which form a container for natural and social phenomena and processes, Kant argued that neither time nor space were objective, real things but were, instead, subjective constructs through which humans make sense of the world. For Kant, any order appearing in the world is the result not of material processes but of the categorization imposed on it by our brains. Although historically Kantian-ism has infused much writing in Geography (May 1970; Livingstone and Harrison 1981), it was perhaps Hart (1982: 21–22) who most forcefully articulated a Kantian view of scales when he suggested that they are merely “subjective artistic devices.” Given that he viewed them as, essen-tially, mental fictions, for Hart there could thus be “no universal rules for recognizing, delimiting, and describing” scales, whilst his argument that scales are “shaped to fit the hand of the indi vidual user” encouraged a theoretical stance which viewed the absolute spaces of the Earth’s surface as capable of being more or less arbitrarily divided up into bigger or smaller areas, with little concern for how such areas might relate to anything “on the ground.” Whilst there are many examples of works adopting such conceptual formulations, Peter Haggett’s Geography: A Modern Synthesis, arguably one of the most influential texts of the 1970s’ “spatial science” tradition within Geography, epitom ized this approach to scale. Thus, Haggett (1972/1975: 17) used a scalar schema for divid-ing up the world that relied principally upon a fairly arbitrary mathematical progression through what he called “Orders of Magnitude” – his Fifth Order of Magnitude represented areas on the Earth’s surface between 1.25 km and 12.5 km in diameter, his Fourth Order areas between 12.5 km and 125 km in diameter, his Third Order areas between 125 km and 1,250 km, his Second Order areas between 1,250 km and 12,500 km, and his First Order anything with diameters from 12,500 km to 40,000 km, the planet’s approximate equatorial circumference. For Haggett, the important analytical questions were not how scales are delineated or made but how “changes in scale change the important, relevant variables” (Meentemeyer 1989: 165) as they affect various pro-cesses and phenomena, whilst the key theoretical declarations involved arguing that multiscalar analysis is crucial for understanding the complexities of human and natural systems. However, following the publica tion of two articles by Taylor (1981, 1982) and of Smith’s (1984/ 1990) book Uneven Development, the concept of scale began to be hotly debated within Human Geography – and, to a degree, Physical Geography – and continues to be so today.

Drawing upon world-systems analysis, Taylor (1981) argued that particular scales take on certain roles under capitalism. Specifically, he main tained that: the global scale is the “scale of reality,” the scale at which capitalism is organized; the national scale is the “scale of ideology,” as it is the scale at which the capitalist class primarily promulgates class-dividing ideologies (such as nationalism); and the urban scale is the “scale of experience,” for cities are where everyday life is primarily lived in capitalist societies. Taking this further, he subsequently argued that there were fundamental contradictions with regard to the scales at which socio-economic classes have historically organized (Taylor 1987). Hence, under capitalism, classes “in themselves” have often been defined globally, such that it is possible to talk analytically of a global working class and a global capitalist class. Classes “for themselves,” however, have tended to organ ize nationally, regionally, or locally. For Taylor, then, there was a disconnect between the scales at which classes under late industrial capitalism exist and the scales at which they often perceive themselves to exist. Despite offering important analytical insights, though, Taylor’s approach suffered from two lacunae: i) by suggesting that certain scales played particular roles within how capitalism operates, his argu-ment seemed to present a somewhat functionalist approach to scale; ii) it did not have much to say about how scales come about in the first place, for it focused instead upon how they are used once in existence (for more on world-systems analysis, see Box 1.2).

Box 1.2 WORLD-SYSTEMS ANALYSIS

World-systems analysis is an approach to understanding how the world is structured economically which draws upon neo-Marxist theory. The approach is probably most associated with the work of sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein (1974), who argued that with the emergence of capitalism there developed a core and a periphery to the world economy and that the former has grown at the latter’s expense – during the nineteenth century, for instance, industrialization in Europe was fuelled by colonialism, with colonies in places such as Africa both providing raw materials for European factories and serving as markets for their products (Herod 2009). Consequently, Wallerstein argued, the world economy can only really be understood by looking at it from a global perspective, a position which privileges the global scale of analysis. A number of other writers have been closely associated with this approach, including Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi and Andre Gunder Frank (see Amin et al.1982). However, these writers have often disagreed on the specifics of the world system’s emergence. Hence, whereas Wallerstein dated its emergence to the so-called “long sixteenth century” (approximately 1450 to 1650) when capitalis...