Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
global as the scales of experience, ideology and capital accumulation, respectively.
Taylor characterised the global scale as the most 'real', refl ecting the Marxian-
materialist priority given to production and simultaneously reinforcing a
top-down, hierarchical notion of scale.
Building on the work of Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey, Neil Smith (1993,
p. 96f.) criticised geography for taking its scales - 'localities, regions, nations
and so forth' - for granted, and for trivialising geographical scale 'as merely a
question of methodological preference'. Focusing on the ontological rather than
the epistemological moment, he stressed the importance of scale in spatial dif-
ferentiation. '[S]cale is produced in and through societal activity which, in turn,
produces and is produced by geographical structures of social interaction...
[T]he production of geographical scale is the site of potentially intense political
struggle'. Smith proceeded to offer a typology of geographical scales similar to
the list given above, but he treated them as operational rather observational. He
specifi ed the processes
that produced each scale materially: for example, daily
commuting for the urban scale, and capital circulation and uneven development
for the global. Insofar as Smith considered how each scale is determined by
interactions with the others, he pointed beyond scale as level towards scale as
relation.
Human geographers have proceeded to explore the production and politics of
scale further, particularly in regard to the city, the nation-state, and the global
economy. Scale as level provides the framework for these studies, insofar as the
nation-state is construed as 'above' the city and 'below' the global in a socio-spatial,
hierarchical order. But the point usually is to understand the historical-geographical
constitution and reconfi guration of levels in relation to one another - such that scale
is construed, at least implicitly, as relational. Erik Swyngedouw (1997) introduced
the term 'glocalisation', for example, to capture the combination of upward and
downward shifts in the scale of accumulation and regulation with the advent of
globalisation. Neil Brenner (1998, p. 464) argued that 'scales are not merely the
platforms within which spatial fi xes are secured, but one of their most fundamental
geographical dimensions, actively and directly implicated in the historical constitu-
tion, reconfi guration, and transformation of each successive confi guration of capi-
talist territorial organization'. Viewed as a process of
rescaling,
globalisation 'entails
less an obliteration of the national spatial scale than its rearticulation with the
subnational and supranational spatial confi gurations on which it is superimposed'
(Brenner, 1997, p. 299).
In different ways, both Swyngedouw and Brenner shift attention away from scale
per se
and towards the processes that produce (patterns that have) scales. Like
Smith, they are concerned with operational scale. Swyngedouw (1997, p. 141) is
explicit: 'The theoretical and political priority . . . never resides in a particular geo-
graphical scale, but rather in the process through which particular scales become
(re)constituted . . . . In short, scale . . . is not and can never be the starting point for
sociospatial theory...the kernel of the problem is theorising and understanding
“process”'. Swyngedouw's (2004; 2007) empirical research refl ects this approach
and is widely credited for bringing ecological processes (such as hydrologic cycling)
into cogent relation with political-economic processes such as capital accumulation
and governance. Brenner (1998, p. 466) emphasises 'the relational, mutually inter-
dependent character of geographical scales under capitalism', and he develops a
thesis that clearly transcends scale as size or level:
