The workshop Biopolitics of scale addresses the role of the modern state in processes of urbanization by focusing on the production and transformation of scalar regimes.
The production of scales as platforms and containers of social practices was an essential part of the emergence of modern urbanism as a biopolitical project since the 18th century and the introduction of new procedures of state administration of life and distribution of risk on the territory. Consequently, scale is an essential concept which allows mapping the transformations of the relationships between state and the processes of urbanization, including the contemporary urban condition after the welfare state. The crisis of the welfare state and its urbanization patters is, since the 1970s, a crisis of the national scale as the primary object of economic management, distribution of welfare, and definition of citizenship, profoundly shaken by the processes of globalization, the emergence of a new level of capital accumulation, and transationalization of labour.
The focus on production, merger, dissipation and transformation of scales offers a common denominator for an understanding of the current processes of urbanization, including the management of the growth of the cities; the regulation of the flows of commodities and people; the distribution of infrastructure, security and welfare; new scales of monument protection; and the introduction of new financial instruments which would facilitate these operations. The interrogation of scale allows going beyond the impasses of the current debates in architecture and urbanism and the suffocating oppositions between the specific and the generic, the local and the global, the top-down and the bottom-up: this concept implies that it is not possible to define one scale independently of the others, but also that each scale, as a specific framework of condensation of social forces, is irreducible to any other. This symposium will discuss scales as designed, produced and contested rather than given by nature, and it will question the ability of architecture and urbanism to reclaim the political economy of scale as their field of competence.
The workshop will take place on April 7th–8th 2009 at the Berlage Institute Rotterdam.
Index of state-space / Workshop 1: Biopolitics of Scale
Parent directory
BioPolitics of Scale_Poster.pdf