Cultural Geography

More than just words, the landscape has also

been depicted in images and maps, and at a confer-

ence of tourism firms in June 1996 in Seattle, the

resulting landscaping of Cascadia was presented

in the form of a glossy poster (see Figure 26.1).

The assembled images in the poster serve at once

to evoke an ancient history and a sublime natu-

ralness for the rescaled cross-border region, rep-

resenting it as rooted as deeply in the soil as the

actual forests on the slopes of the Cascade

mountains. The result is a graphic that involves the

whole panoply of iconic commodification. From

the trees themselves to the treeless golf courses,

every object and activity is effectively marked as

open for the new cross-border business of

tourism. Meanwhile, the images are put together

with a map that lends a sense of objectivity and

historicity to the resulting Cascadian landscape.

This glossy attempt to project the region’s

binational diversity means that little escapes the

image’s instrumentalizing embrace. Native arti-

facts, waterfalls, bears, eagles, salmon, trees and

orcas are all packaged together into the advertise-

ment. In this superficially aestheticizing way,

they are all also reduced to serving as objects for

the long-distance touristic gaze (for more on the

effects of such a gaze on landscape imagery see

Duncan and Gregory, 2000). The objects in the

image thus form a fantastic landscape to be viewed

from afar, a culturally coded rescaled place that

links the entrepreneurial vision of the promoters

with would-be vacationers’ visions generated on

the other side of the world. While serving thus as

touristic objects, they also function for the promot-

ers as a means of fashioning a natural Cascadian

future out of the region’s objectified natural

history. Indeed, while the ‘Two-Nation Vacation’

advertisements reflect an attempt to market

Cascadia’s novelty and diversity as a cross-border

region, it is equally notable that they also reflect an

attempt to suggest that this is the way things

naturally always should have been. It is this effort

to naturalize the cross-border region’s status as a

consolidated region that reflects in turn the poli-

tics and economics of scale-jumping at play.

Moreover, the work of the poster itself serves as a

form of epistemological framing device which, tar-

geted at tourism agencies as much as at tourists

themselves, aims to reframe at a new scale the pre-

viously disconnected destinations of British

Columbia and the US Pacific Northwest, repre-

senting them as a unified regional unit. The very

semiotic lengths to which the poster goes in order

to entrench a sense of the region’s naturalness and

ancient history are therefore themselves part as

well as parcel of the processes of scale-jumping.

Although the promoters never use the

language of scale-jumping themselves, they are

often quite explicit about the political-economic

context they see as necessitating their cross-

border rescaling schemes. ‘We are competing for

tourists in a global market’ Alan Artibise, a

Canadian academic and promoter, explained in

1995: ‘To maintain our market share, and indeed

increase it, we can do very well by marketing a

region that crosses international borders’ (quoted

in Webb, 1995: A5). More than just creating a

novel niche region with which to attract inter-

national consumption spending, though, there is

another still more profound political-economic

imperative at work behind the development of

the cross-border landscape. This basic impera-

tive is interpreted by the local elites as a need to

‘cooperate regionally in order to compete glob-

ally’ (Chapman, 1996), and, just as with a

number of other cooperative ventures aimed at

marketing Cascadia as a site for foreign direct

investment, the binational tourism projects are

conceived, if not practiced, as another key area

for cross-border cooperation. Launched primarily

at the instigation of the Port of Seattle, the

‘Two-Nation Vacation’ has also been supported

by BC tourism interests as a way of appealing to

long-distance tourists from the UK, Germany

and Australia. As a marketing concept it simply

illustrates an attempt to twin the post-NAFTA

notion of a borderless region with the econo-

mizing notion that Cascadian tourists can

explore two nations and all of their collective

recreational diversity for the price of just one

long-distance plane ride. However, as part of

the larger, scale-jumping dynamics from the

national to the continental associated with

NAFTA, the resulting Cascadian landscape is

also envisioned very much as a sign of the free-

trade times (Sparke, 2000). Here, for example,

is a typical epochal invocation of the region’s

raison d’être:

The lines imposed over 100 years ago have simply been

transcended by contemporary cultural and economic

realities ... Cascadia is organizing itself around what

will be the new realities of the next century – open bor-

ders, free trade, regional cooperation, and the instant

transfer of information, money and technology. The

nineteenth- and twentieth-century realities of the

nation-state, with guarded borders and nationalistic

traditions, are giving way. (Schell and Hamer, 1995: 141)

Other visionaries of the Cascadian landscape

have argued that its special future as some sort of

neoliberal utopia is already underwritten by a

vast cross-section of cross-border economies of

scale (Goldberg and Levi, 1993). In the context

of free trade, they argue, these economies are

only going to grow, and the result will be a

rescaled cross-border region unfettered by old

THE CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY OF SCALE 489

3029-ch26.qxd 03-10-02 11:05 AM Page 489