Scale, social production of

One of geography’s core concepts, scale has become a hotly contested, even chaotic, concept. Until the 1980s scales such as the national scale or regional scale were frequently employed, but little or no time was devoted to theorising scale itself. Scale was a taken-for-granted concept used to impose organisation and order on the world. Over the past thirty years, a much vaunted ‘scale debate’ emerged during the 1980s, developed through the 1990s, and erupted in the early-2000s. The debate centres on whether scale is a mental device for categorising and ordering the world or whether scales exist as material social products.