Space & Society: the question of scale

Reading

• Valentine Ch 1 esp. pp. 7-11

Valentine’s Book

• Built around different scales– The Body– The Home– The Community, Street– The City– The Nation– (The Globe?)

Peter Haggett and scale

• Famous geography text

• begins with a couple on the beach– discusses larger scales– discusses smaller scales– puts scales in geography

in the middle

“A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.”

- Joseph Stalin

Scale

• Is it just a matter of size? (Haggett)– Politically neutral, objective

• Or does scale change the social & cultural meaning of things? (Valentine)

Scale is the difference between different kinds of places

--Neil Smith

Cartesian Dualism

• “I think therefore I am” (Rene Descartes)– Body and mind are separate

• body takes up space

• mind occupies no space

– Justifies other dualisms:• People vs Nature

• Culture vs Nature

• Mind vs Body

– Plain wrong

“I am plagued by doubts. What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.”

--- Woody Allen in Without Feathers, p. 10.

Feminist contribution

• The body as an important scale in social relations

• Connection between bodies and society

• Critique of dualism:– men/mind/culture vs women/bodies/nature

– bodies, minds, society, the universe are all integrated

Social relations cut across scales

Elora ON, Canada Day 2002

Geographical scales are not fixed

• The City:– 14th Century Florence:

• 100,000 people

• 20 minutes to walk across it

– 21st century Toronto• 5 million people

• 2 hours to drive across it

• Cities have changed their scales

Geographical scales are not fixed

• Scales which have vanished– the rural school section in Ontario– townships in Chatham-Kent– old-style political wards in Toronto– 300+ micro-states in pre-unification Germany– Canada as a sovereign tariff area within North

America

Scale is produced through social relations

• Industrial revolution:– created vast cities, global economic system– created the nuclear family– created modern imperialism

• 1940s US Sociology– created the Census Tract– created community planning

Scale and Computers

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."

-Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

• 1950: Computers only available to big government

• 2002: Computers universal at the personal scale

Connected scales: Imperialism

Local scale: the imperial centre

Local scale: colonial periphery

Imperialism: National Imagination

Scale can be Political:

• The powerful contain the weak by controlling scale– confine to restricted spaces

• Imprisonment, South African “pass laws”

– suppress local identity• Abolition of French provinces

• Conscription into French Army

Scale can be Political:

• Conflict of different scales– Toronto vs Queen’s Park

• “The Harris government is hurting families”

• “Ontario should not be run by special-interest groups”

Maggie T and scale

Britain in the 1980s

• Thatcher had clear majority in parliament– No effective opposition at national level

– Weakened the labour unions

Britain in the 1980s

• Only real opposition: large metropolitan urban governments– Greater Manchester, Merseyside, Greater

London etc.,

– Thatcher abolishes them 1985

• Example of scale being politicised

Nuclear Power in France• So you want to build a Nuclear station?

– National anti-nuke protestors will oppose the scheme

• Pick a small, poor, rural community

• Spend $100 million in it

• Get the plant approved via the local planning process– planners can rule out-of-town protesters

ineligible to speak

Michel Foucault

• Interested in relationship between power and place

• How power shapes different kinds of space– prison cell, asylum, hospital

• A future inmate?

Michel Foucault• How space shapes different kinds of power

– where experts speak from• Doctors, scientists: from clinics, labs and from

scientific observation

• Teachers, professors: from libraries, the podium, ivory towers

• Clergy: from pulpits

• Revolutionaries: from the barricades

– scale is a factor

Scale

• Can be treated as a matter of size– look at place from different scales

– pretend it is neutral and objective

• Can recognize scale as – socially constructive

– socially constructed

• Scale matters either way