ScalarArchitecture names the organisation of relations across distinct but connected levels of resolution. It rejects the assumption that scale is merely a difference of size or that the same causal logic can be transferred unchanged from body to object, building, institution, territory or corpus. Each scale selects different evidence, produces different forms of agency and makes different consequences visible. The operator therefore concerns the construction of passages between levels: how a local condition is translated into a systemic claim, how a territorial structure enters bodily experience and how an intervention at one level accumulates, dissipates or mutates at another. ScalarArchitecture becomes necessary whenever enlargement or reduction risks erasing the relations that give a phenomenon its form. Its task is not to unify all scales within one hierarchy, but to specify where continuity exists, where discontinuity appears and which mediations are required between them. The operator succeeds when cross-scale movement remains analytically explicit and no level is allowed to stand as a complete representation of the whole.
Bibliography
Brenner, N. (2001) ‘The Limits to Scale?’, Progress in Human Geography, 25(4), pp. 591–614.
Harvey, D. (2006) Spaces of Global Capitalism. London: Verso.
Lefebvre, H. (1991) The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell.
Marston, S.A. (2000) ‘The Social Construction of Scale’, Progress in Human Geography, 24(2), pp. 219–242.
Swyngedouw, E. (2004) Social Power and the Urbanization of Water. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tsing, A.L. (2012) ‘On Nonscalability’, Common Knowledge, 18(3), pp. 505–524.
