“Scale” as a Heuristic Device for Understanding Urban Governance

• In Event: The Nationalization of Politics: Evidence across Cities, Regions, and Nations

Abstract

Cities today are nested within complex and often contested geopolitical environments. However, rather than asserting that the city has become a chaotic and uncontrollable policy space, or an entity in which decision making is reactionary and left purely to vagaries of structural forces, in this paper we opt for a different path. Following theorists such as Oren Yiftachel (2016) it is asserted that it may be “time to move beyond the numbing theoretical dominance of globalization and neoliberal capitalism”, and deal seriously with the contingent and dynamic nature of these forces and the ways in which they shape urban governance processes and outcomes. This paper proposes a view of the city, as shaped by more than neoliberal forces. Using the concept of “scale”, as derived from the subfields of critical urban studies and geography, it will be used to illustrate how this concept can be utilized as a heuristic device to better understand the multiple logics (social, economic, political and spatial) shaping urban governance. In this rendering, “scale” is seen as a strategic institutional space, with both material and discursive dimensions (Brenner, 2001; Swyngedouw, 2004). The concept is viewed as providing the strategic-relational scaffolding through which to better understand urban governance outcomes, within distinct historic and geographic contexts. Thus, scale is not viewed as deterministic, but rather an emergent and contested phenomenon. In this paper, I hope to reveal the ways in which a ‘scalar imagination’ can play a relevant role in the better understanding – the meanings, beliefs, historicity, discourses and narratives that inform the activities that make up patterns of the urban governance. (Bevir and Krupicka, 2011; Gross, Gualini and Ye, 2019). Data for this paper is derived from the findings of the International Metropolitan Research Consortium (iMRC), a four-year collaborative research project on the political construction of scale in Berlin, Delhi, Istanbul, New York, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Rome and Shenzhen.

Author

• Jill Simone Gross, CUNY-Hunter College