Scaled Geographies: Nature, Place, and the Politics of Scale

Abstract

In early 1998 (Le Monde, 17 January), controversy arose in the Paris region about IBM's continuing tapping of ancient underground aquifers. The production of new generation computer chips requires large volumes of water of the highest purity to cleanse micro-pores. Environmentalists, seeking to protect historical 'natural waters', were outraged. The water company, Lyonnaise des Eaux, was worried about the potential loss of water and, consequently, future dividends. The state at a variety of scales was caught up in the myriad of tensions ensuing from this: protection of the natural environment versus economic priorities, the competing claims of different companies, etc… The ancient underground waters fused with politics, economics and culture in intricate ways. This is just one example from a proliferating number where the traditional distinction between environment and society, between nature and culture, becomes blurred, ambiguous and problematic. The contested 'making' of 'Dolly', the cloned sheep, the outbreak of BSE (mad cow disease), the built-up of CO 2 in the atmosphere, and the depletion of ozone in the stratosphere similarly fuse physical-environmental metabolisms with socio-cultural and political-economic relations. These all suggest how nature and society are constituted as networks of interwoven processes that are human and natural, real and fictional, mechanical and organic. They also suggest how the social and physical transformation of the world is inserted in a series of scalar spatialities. 'Dolly', Ozone, or Parisian aquifer waters all embody and express physical and social processes, whose drivers operate at a variety of interlocked and nested geographical scales.

Spatiality of the Commons

“…The danger of subsuming material elements purely to objects of human perception and thereby disregarding their intrinsic and distinctive attributes, as prominently critiqued by Actor-Network Theory (Latour 2005), is an issue of contention in the social sciences. Many geographers are arguing for a more nuanced understanding of complex and dynamic socio-material configurations and their spatial embodiments (Swyngedouw 2004;Kaika 2005;Heynen et al 2006;Farías and Bender 2010;McFarlane 2011). This work can be inspirational for commons research exploring relationships between the social, the environmental and the technical.…”

“…Processes of rescaling, whereby actors alter the significance of existing scalar configurations or generate new ones, are an expression of this dynamism and deliberation. Of particular relevance to commons researchers are recent works applying the rescaling concept to environmental goods (Swyngedouw 2004(Swyngedouw , 2010Bulkeley 2005;Lebel et al 2005). d) Inspired by work in the political sciences on the emergence of new functional spaces and their (often problematic) relationship with politicaladministrative territories (Hooghe and Marks 2003) as well as problems of fit and interplay (Young 1999), recent studies in the planning sciences are exploring new spatial configurations for the management of regional commons (Fürst et al 2008;Gailing 2012).…”

Landfarming: A contested space for the management of waste from oil and gas extraction

“…Accordingly, it wasn't just the sample size that limited the sort of knowledge produced by the Edmeades' report but also the specific history of waste application at the sites concerned and the restriction of the analysis to on-site residues. But if scale is an epistemological category (Jones, 1998), it is also inherently political because whether a given report produces ignorance rather than knowledge, either way it constitutes an exercise of power (Swyngedouw, 2004), a matter that is of particular relevance when such work is seen to have direct policy implications.…”

Making Space for Theory: The Challenges of Theorizing Space and Place for Spatial Analysis in Criminology

“…The arguments about scale focus on the geographic reach and scope of the social activities that are presumed to form places and how such scales can be and are routinely created, maintained, and marshaled by people for certain political and economic agendas (e.g., Taylor 1982;Smith 1992;Swyngedouw 2004). An important element of these critiques for this discussion is that the larger the scale that one chooses to focus upon to define a place or to otherwise bound or delimit a place, the more likely it is that the specific issue of interest can be obscured from the analyst by processes operating at various other scales and in various other places (e.g., Massey 1997).…”