Urban Geography With Scale

Rethinking Scale via Wal-Mart's "Geography of Big Things" 1

Bibliographic Data

ID11670410
AuthorsDavid L Prytherch (The Miami University), David Prytherch (Miami University, corresponding author)
Year2007
Volume28
Issue5
Pages456-482
Publication date2007-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueUrban Geography (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0272-3638 • E-ISSN: 1938-2847
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.2747/0272-3638.28.5.456
OpenAlexW1982718045
LanguageEN
Citations received9
References cited45

Human geographers have recently rethought the concept of geographic scale in important ways that have unrealized potential for the urban-geographic study of the relative spatiality of urban processes and forms. Yet in an influential 2005 article, Marston, Jones III, and Woodward suggested that scale should be "expurgated" from the human geographical lexicon, an argument they have more recently reiterated. My article questions this on both theoretical and empirical grounds. First, I consider the origins of hierarchical, vertically ordered scale to suggest such interpretations may inhere more in a territorialized imaginary in political geography than scale itself. Second, I propose an urban-geographic rereading of scale as a volumetric, networked, space of flows. Exploring this idea through the example of Wal-Mart's "geography of big things," I suggest we need to recover and elaborate scale to better understand the outsized spatiality of the big box and the global commodity chains in which it is embedded

Argument (complex analysis · Big data · Cartography · Commodity · Cultural geography · Economic geography · Economics · Geography · Human geography · Political science · Politics · Regional science · Scale (ratio · Sociology · Urban geography · Urban planning · Urban theory · Computer Science · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Global Urban Networks and Dynamics · Law · Urban Planning and Governance · Ecology

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