RESTRUCTURING, RESCALING AND THE URBAN QUESTION
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2179-0892.geousp.2013.74311Keywords:
Scale, Rescaling, Urban restructuring, Spatial theory, Urban questionAbstract
Against the background of recent debates on scale and sociospatial theory, this essay explores some of the limits and possibilities of scale-attuned interpretations of after-Fordist and early 21st century patterns of urban and regional restructuring. I begin by excavating some of the scalar presuppositions that underpinned debates on the urban question in the 1970s and 1980s. I then suggest that, since the 1990s, the urban question has been reconceptualized in reflexively scalar terms in the context of debates on worldwide urban and regional restructuring. The problematic of geographical scale – its spatial organization, its social production, its political contestation and its historical reconfiguration – has thus been inserted into the very heart of the urban question. Subsequent sections affirm the usefulness of a scalar perspective on contemporary urban transformations, but underscore the persistent difficulty of defining its distinctive analytical content. I confront this problem by offering a series of general propositions intended to specify the determinate conceptual parameters of scale questions and, by implication, rescaling processes. The proposed theorization entails a conceptual narrowing of scale questions: concepts of scale should not be conflated with those of space, place, territory, or networks. Consequently, the churning, polymorphic geographies of urban restructuring cannot and should not be conceptualized entirely in scalar terms. I argue, however, that scalar concepts remain essential tools for deciphering some of the key dimensions of contemporary urban transformations.Downloads
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