Downsizing Wal-Mart: A Reply to Prytherch

Abstract

We are grateful to the editors of Urban Geography for inviting us to respond to the recent article by David Prytherch (2007), “Urban Geography With Scale: Rethinking Scale Via Wal-Mart’s Geography of Big Things.” In his essay, Prytherch criticized our article, “Human Geography Without Scale” (Marston et al., 2005), in which we argued that scale is an irredeemably chaotic concept, one more suggestive of a pervasive hierarchical epistemology—wherein geographers sort and analogize sociospatial processes through “levels”—than an ontological effort to think through the material-spatiality of processes, events, and orders. Together with us, Prytherch is ready to reject poorly conceived hierarchies that transcendentalize sociospatial processes by tossing them onto orders higher than the state of affairs would suggest. Yet he is not, in his words, ready to throw out the concept with the “dirty epistemological bathwater” (p. 461). Instead, Prytherch attempts to recoup scale by arguing that it is a proportional or relative concept; that it should be understood as a volumetric, networked, space of flows; and that urban (more so than political or economic) geography can provide unique insights into what scale is and how it is structured and works. He goes on to illustrate his case for the scalar geography of “big things” by describing some of the flows and coordinations necessary to fill a 200,000-plus square foot Wal-Mart Supercenter in West Phoenix, Arizona. In this reply, we want to accomplish three things: (1) briefly summarize our position with respect to scale (see also our reply to critics in Jones et al., 2007); (2) examine what we believe are flaws in Prytherch’s effort to rethink and thereby recover scale for urban geography 2 ; and (3) suggest where to start in a different approach to reading a phenomenon such as Wal-Mart.