Framing Space and Time in the City: Urban Policy and the Politics of Spatial and Temporal Scale

ABSTRACT:

This article seeks to analyze urban politics through the lens of the social constructionist approach to scale. This approach views scale not as a set of pre-given, natural, and immutable levels upon which social life occurs. Rather, it regards scale as a fluid context for and product of power relations in society. The article argues that urban politics is frequently characterized by political strategies that frame reality in terms of scale. Agents of the state, capital, and civil society all engage in the politics around competing scalar framings. As a result, the politics of scale has important but contingent material consequences. The article illustrates these points through a case study of the politics that surrounded the development of a new neighborhood planning initiative in Austin, Texas in the late 1990s. Based on this case study, the article also argues that while geographers studying the politics of scale tend to explain it solely in terms of spatial scale, scalar politics in the urban context frequently combines framings of spatial and temporal scale. This simultaneous framing of space and time in the city has important, if sometimes unpredictable, implications for policy and politics.