Scale

Scale is at the heart of all geographic investigations. Yet although it currently is a central concept across the many subfields of geography, 25 years ago few geographers other than cartographers paid much theoretical attention to it. Scale was a concept that interested geographers methodologically, either through questions of cartographic scale or with respect to the influence of an areal unit on statistical analyses and outcomes. Cartographic scale, one of the mainstays of the art and science of cartography, is a measure of the relationship between a map's size and the portion of the real world it is intended to represent. The representative fraction (RF), which associates distance on a map to distance on the earth, is the standard way of describing this meaning of scale. In spatial statistics, the predominant concern has been with what is known as operational scale, that is, the geographic area (such as the unit size [e.g., a neighborhood vs. a city] or the extent of a watercourse vs. a river system) within which processes are in operation and at which they may be effectively observed. In both of these cases—cartographic and operational—scale is an abstract construct that helps geographers to represent and organize space.

During the past two decades, geographic scale, in contrast to cartographic or operational scale, has become a new focus for human geographers as it is increasingly seen to be key to theorizing and comprehending globalization in its economic, cultural, political, and environmental manifestations. One of the first attempts to explore geographic scale came from Peter Taylor, who produced a “three-scale structure” model consisting of the micro scale of the urban (which he labeled the domain of experience), the meso scale of the nation-state (which he labeled the sphere of ideology), and the macro scale of the world economy (which was understood to be the “scale of reality”). Taylor's model was intended to provide a hierarchy to the horizontal model of world systems theory (core, periphery, and semiperiphery) advanced by Immanuel Wallerstein. The chief strength of Taylor's model was that it helped to show how space could be thought of as vertically organized and how these different levels of space were part of the wider processes of capital accumulation. A significant weakness of Taylor's scale model was that it was static and overly top-down in its emphasis on the macro scale—where capital accumulation predominated—the level that determined what happened in the lower two scales. Building on the work of Taylor, Neil Smith recognized that scale was important to understanding the way in which the world economy worked, but he saw the fixity inherent in Taylor's model to be problematic. Smith suggested instead that cooperation and competition (at all levels of the hierarchy) over capitalist production and accumulation processes were central to understanding scale and that sometimes the macro or global scale might be determinative, whereas at other times it might not be. The central outcome of introducing dynamism into all three levels of Taylor's fixed geographic scale hierarchy was to demonstrate that the scales that constitute capitalist space are not a given—the urban, regional, national, and global are not preexisting categories—but rather are produced through the complex processes of capitalist expansion. A secondary and especially fertile outcome of Smith's research on scale was the[Page 422] recognition that the production of scale was a political process, by which he meant not only that scale was not a fixed hierarchy but also that the production of scale was a contested process by institutions and actors operating locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally within a capitalist framework. Given the different contests in play, and understanding capitalism to be a system that is the product of social forces, it became important to recognize that different scales could be determinative at different times and in different locations. Recognizing that scale production was a political process also enabled Smith to theorize the possibility of jumping scale, by which he meant that institutions or actors who had established political claims at one level (e.g., the level of the household) could expand their efforts to another level (e.g., the level of the city) to shape the operations of the capitalist political economy.

...