Scale and Its Histories

While geographers have long considered the meaning of place, space, and landscape, they have only recently turned their attention toward the concept of scale. During the 1990s and 2000s it was taken up in the “scale debates” in human geography, but these debates engaged very little with the scientific geography, cartography, or GIS communities. While no consensus was ever reached about what exactly scale means, its degree of usefulness, or whether it even exists, the continued use of scale has nevertheless become stigmatized or even blacklisted from the vernacular of human geography. I argue that what was missing from the scale debates was that cartographic scale is not the oldest form of scale; rather, scale as a mentifact predates its use in cartography. This point is important because it exposes scale’s two histories: one as a mentifact tied to the human condition, justice, and value, and the other as a representational device that aides in transforming three-dimensional objects into two-dimensional form. The implications of this bifurcated history show that the varied and unstable nature of the meaning of scale complicates its use within all subfields of geography.