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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