Far from neutral and fixed, therefore,

geographical scales are the products of

economic, political and social activities

and relationships; as such, they are as

changeable as those relationships them-

selves. At the very least, different kinds

of society produce different kinds of

geographical scale for containing and

enabling particular forms of social

interaction. (Neil Smith, 1995: 60–1)

Geographical theories of scale have come a long

way since the days when geographers used to

invoke fixed notions of local, regional and

national scales as if they were universally under-

stood and unchanging analytical categories.

Recent research has highlighted the social con-

struction of scaleand the ways in which scale is

negotiated and reproduced. Such insights invite

scholars to move beyond seeing scale as a politi-

cally neutral container of social processes or a

methodological abstraction, and to consider

instead how it is produced through socio-

economic struggles and transformations. These

approaches have largely developed out of

Marxist theories of the production of space, most

notably Neil Smith’s (1984) arguments about the

creative destruction of scale wrought by capital-

ist processes of uneven development. Smith

argued that particular consolidations of capitalist

territoriality – the formation of regional clusters

or cities or even nation-states, for example – need

to be seen as transient scalar fixes which, however

concretized they may seem, are always vulnerable

to the transformations brought about by new

rounds of capitalist investment and disinvestment.

In this chapter we begin from these basic Marxist

insights into what has come to be known as ‘scale-

jumping’. However, in introducingthem into an

arena of examination addressed by cultural

geography – the production and contestation of

cultural landscapes – we also argue that the

Marxian focus on capitalist economic determina-

tions needs to be radically supplemented by

attention to cultural-political forces of ideology,

resistance and the construction and negotiation

of cultural identity. In this way we seek to

explore the production of scale as the overdeter-

mined effect of diverse cultural, political and

economic power relations. Reciprocally, we also

argue that, because scale-jumping represents the

reconfiguration of the territorial scopeof power

relations, it provides a particularly powerful

entry point into empirical research on the ideo-

logical overdetermination of particular cultural

geographies. We will elaborate on our under-

standing of ideology and overdetermination

shortly, but first we need to clarify the basic

argument about scale-jumping from which we

are beginning.

The Marxian formulation of scale-jumping

develops directly out of Smith’s radical interpre-

tation of uneven development as a product of the

tension between capitalist tendencies towards

territorial equalization and differentiation, ten-

dencies which themselves relate to the tension

between competition and cooperation in capital-

ism (see also Smith, 2000). Smith argues that

scalar fixes emerge as partial and temporary reso-

lutions of the capitalist tensions between equal-

ization and differentiation and it follows that

they are frequently superseded by new spatial

resolutions in response to capitalist reorganiza-

tion. In this way, capitalist territorial organization

‘jumps’ scale in the context of overaccumulation

or other moments of capitalist crisis and crisis

management (see also Harvey, 1999). For example,

Smith (1995) points to the development of the

26

The Cultural Geography of Scale

Clare Newstead Carolina K. Reid, Matthew Sparke

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