Multi-scalar Perspective Research Articles

The Fences of Melilla and Evros: Assessing Logics of Opposition and Support from A Multiscalar Perspective

ABSTRACT A rigorous understanding of the logic that support the transformation of European walls and fences requires a detailed study of the particular and interlinked visions of multiple actors beyond central states. This paper follows a multiscalar perspective to evaluate the logic of opposition to support from different actors regarding the border barriers between Melilla (Morocco-Spain) and Evros (Greece-Türkiye). It examines how neighboring states of Morocco and Türkiye, local governments, the European Union, and Amnesty International converge or not in their position towards each fence, considering their vision on specific dimensions of analysis, such as the purpose, suitability, and features of each fence. This paper adopts a qualitative methodology based on the compilation and analysis of discourses and official communications, local and international news media from 2013 to 2023, civil society reports, and scholarly literature. The article demonstrates more opposition to the Evros fence than the Melilla fence. Moreover, while various actors validate the purpose behind these artificial borders in reducing irregular migration, some actors show concerns about the effectiveness of this tool, and almost all stakeholders question the features of these fences. Notwithstanding this criticism, Spain and Greece have been able to advance in strengthening their fences.

Construction minerals as part of an urban circular economy? A multi-scalar study of the city of Oslo and its hinterland

Abstract Flows of construction minerals in the Oslo region are studied in a multi-scalar perspective. Urban densification and construction of infrastructure result in large volumes of gravel and stone which according to law is waste. Waste is landfilled in the hinterland putting pressure on socio-ecological qualities. Lack of regional planning promoting circularity implies municipalities in the hinterland have to regulate land for landfills. Norway has a competitive advantage in construction minerals and prices on virgin, compared to recycled construction minerals are relatively low. Combined with a planning regime supporting linear resource governance, the consumption of virgin construction minerals and farmland in the hinterland is de facto stimulated. Differences are identified between the Oslo region and some city regions in the core of Europe concerning the level of progress towards a circular economy. A distinction between resource-rich and resource-strapped regions is proposed as part of an explanation of such differences.

Owning the just transition: comparing citizen participation in South African and German wind farms

ABSTRACT The global effort to reduce carbon emissions, driven by industrialised countries in the north is increasingly perceived as an unfair imposition by countries in the south. Wind turbine technology importantly contributes to the energy transition and its introduction has produced new players in energy systems, for instance through financial citizen participation in wind farms. The shape and degree of citizen participation is geographically variegated even within countries. Taking a multi-scalar perspective inspired by institutional theory, we explore the micro, meso and macro institutional and regulatory frameworks perceived as supportive or restrictive in the development of citizen participation in Germany and South Africa. Our findings highlight the importance of citizens’ ability and will to create legal structures for inclusive collective action and their ability to access affordable investment capital through local banks and other financing arrangements. Under the right institutional conditions decentralised energy systems, such as small-scale wind farms, provide an opportunity for fostering emotive and economic ownership by citizens in the global north and south alike.

Intimate liminality in Spain's berry industry

AbstractSpain's berry industry relies on the agricultural labour of both local and seasonal migrant workers. A significant part of this migrant workforce comprises Moroccan mothers who leave their children with relatives in order to perform this wage labour. The bilateral recruitment regime favours the employment of Moroccan women with children for this labour to ensure that workers return home at the end of the harvesting season. Drawing on multi‐site ethnographic research in Spain and Morocco, this study revealed the effects of this bilateral labour regime on the intimate lives of migrant workers. We argue that the geopolitical prescriptions of this labour migration regime, along with the working and living conditions of migrant workers in Huelva, result in experiences of intimate liminality. We examined these experiences by exploring: (1) how the role of female workers as mothers becomes liminal as transnational labour agreements marginalise and outsource care obligations, (2) how governmental neglect of migrant workers' occupational health exposes them to reproductive health risks and (3) how this neglect places them in a liminal space in terms of access to healthcare, and (4) how, despite their liminality, migrant workers contest precarious conditions through everyday solidarity practices. We advance a feminist approach to liminality, emphasising the importance of an embodied, intersectional, and multiscalar perspective.

Producing rice, eating tradition? A multiscalar ricescape in Hong Kong

ABSTRACT Hong Kong was not only a place where rice had been widely grown to support its own population, but had also once produced rice for overseas markets. However, rice production had declined rapidly since the 1960s and disappeared in the 1990s. Since the 2010s, there has been a reemergence of rice planting in Hong Kong carried out by conservationists, NGOs and individual farmers. In 2021, an heirloom rice cultivation campaign was launched by the Hong Kong government which further boosted local rice planting. Food growing is contingent on locations, yet, its symbolic meanings and signification often cross scales. This paper puts forward a multiscalar perspective of the recent ricescape, which involves overlapping socio spatial spheres, networking multiple actors, and creating multifarious interpretations of local rice. While this ricescape seems to entail converged efforts that revive the local rice identity and agricultural heritage, it has also contested the meanings of food localism in Hong Kong. We tap into the cross-scales of food movement at a time when there have been huge social rifts and interrogate the relations between rice heritage, rural conservation, and social identity and cohesion.

Cultures of (im)mobile entanglements

What does the increased reliance on digital communication technologies by migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, migrant communities, governments and researchers reveal about the benefits, limits and politics of everyday mobile and immobile experiences during the pandemic? This introduction to the special issue on cultures of (im)mobile entanglements addresses this inquiry, alongside ten articles covering themes of governance and surveillance, agency and negotiated subjectivities, translocal and transnational solidarity, as well as doing research in pandemic times. Critically engaging with both mobility and immobility in the intersecting field of mobilities and migration research, the special issue centres a multidimensional and multi-scalar perspective on the deep interlinking of various modes of mobilities and stasis in and beyond spatial and temporal conditions mediated by politically and culturally structured digitalization. It endeavours to create a vantage point to critically examine the mobility–immobility continuum as informed by power relations, hierarchies and inequalities in a networked and global society.

Multiscalar strategies in right-wing populism: a comparison of West European parties in borderlands

ABSTRACT This paper demonstrates the heuristic value of using a multiscalar perspective to analyse right-wing populist discourse, especially in borderland regions. While it is commonly posited that right-wing populist ideology implies a Manichean dichotomy between in- and out-groups, this study reveals that right-wing populist discursive strategies can thrive in multiscalar contexts. To substantiate this claim, the article conducts a comparative analysis of the discourses employed by a set of right-wing populist parties in borderland regions of Western Europe during the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings highlight that although these parties’ discourse predominantly revolves around the national scale, there is a complex interplay among subnational, national, cross-border and supranational scales. By advocating for the reinstatement of border controls during the crisis, European right-wing parties engage in scalar reconfiguration.

Mentoring for social inclusion: a call for social work to engage with an emerging model of social intervention

ABSTRACT A new form of volunteer-based intervention is mushrooming across Europe: social mentoring. Such programmes turn ‘ordinary’ citizens into mentors for individuals from disadvantaged groups. Related initiatives are becoming more institutionalised and social mentoring has gained popularity as a social policy measure, especially in the face of crises. However, the social work discussion has taken little notice of this burgeoning phenomenon adjoining our professional field. There is a lack of concepts and data that could fuel a debate at the intersection of mentoring for social inclusion, human services, and welfare policies. This paper presents a first attempt to outline what social mentoring means, why social work should engage with it and how we can research into it. It offers theoretical reflection on ongoing developments in the EU, based on observation of the literature and field. To expand the available knowledge, it is suggested that research should pay equal attention to all three constituent elements of the topic: personal relationships, programmes, and policies. In line with critical traditions, this paper suggests a holistic, multi-scalar perspective that is sensitive to social inequalities and power imbalances, while also embracing innovative and transformative aspects of social mentoring as a ‘popular’ form of social problems work.

Simulating Ecological Connectivity and River Behaviour for Dynamic Territorial Mapping

Centres to human life, cities represent the main threat to fine ecological balances, which are in turn responsible at multiple levels for the health of citizens. Metropolitan areas are therefore key in addressing such issues to maintain the wellbeing of all living things. Within today’s digital culture, designers have the opportunity to face these unprecedented challenges by approaching landscape under a dynamic, collective, multidisciplinary and multiscalar perspective, enabled through data driven design. These frameworks have the potential to empower designers to engage with nature as an active partner, through a set of new elements and tools to understand, represent and create these landscapes. The article discusses an experimental methodology for design and planning processes that detect and amplify potential and beneficial ecological connections within urban areas, providing an opportunity to consciously design for, and within, climate change adaptation.

Zoonotic urbanisation: multispecies urbanism and the rescaling of urban epidemiology

A focus on zoonotic urbanisation challenges existing conceptions of global urbanism. In this article I consider how a modified urban political ecology framework might help to illuminate emerging landscapes of epidemiological risk. I show how a multi-scalar perspective on urban epidemiology, including the impact of colonialism, global capitalism, and changing relations with non-human others, unsettles existing analytical approaches. I contrast resilience-oriented public health paradigms, focused on the malleability of nature, with a historically grounded set of insights into global environmental change. I suggest that the conceptual field of zoonotic urbanisation provides an analytical entry point for understanding an emergent ‘triple crisis’ spanning climate change, biodiversity loss, and global health threats.

Linking knowledge-intensive firm locations with the urban structure of the city of Munich

: Knowledge-intensive location decisions follow different logics on different scales to optimise their value-creation processes across space. However, the resilience and innovation capacity of the economy and society face structural challenges of deglobalisation, decarbonisation, demographics and digitalisation. At the same time, the demand for knowledge-intensive workers is increasing. The location choices of firms are confronted with rapidly altering market forces. The growing demand-side power of the workforce – and their location preferences – challenge firms and cities to rethink the use and design of space and neighbourhoods. Against the backdrop of this interdependence between strategic location choice and the increasing demand power of knowledge-intensive workers, we examine which locations and thus which spaces are chosen in the Functional Urban Area of Munich and Freising and how this choice has changed over a 10-year period. We assume that, depending on the knowledge base of the firm, the location preferences will differ from each other. We try to elucidate this process of transformation by linking a multi-scalar perspective on firm locations with georeferenced data for each firm location. This relational approach bridges the functional location choice logic of multi-location multi-branch firms in the knowledge economy with spatial attributes at the neighbourhood level, which we use as a spatial interpretive background. The strong preference for easy access to public spaces, urban amenities and mixeduse areas are interrelated through multi-scalar change processes at various inter-scalar levels and thus may alter the urban scale and, eventually, the wider city-regional scale. The findings will enable local planning and real estate development strategies to reconcile the acute transformation needs of firm locations with integrative urban development in order to create added spatial value for the entire city.

How to be authentic on Instagram

Abstract This paper analyses the way young people negotiate their ‘real’ identity on Instagram, and how self-presentation can be developed by means of language choice. We draw our data from the corpus of the Gaztesare project. It contains the Instagram production of Basque university students who draw on an inventory of multilingual resources in their interactions. We consider Instagram to be a multi-scalar context in which different orders of indexicality converge (Blommaert 2010). The study analyses, from this multi-scalar perspective, the place of Basque in the language choices the students make in order to belong, to be authentic as someone or something (Varis and Wang 2011). It concludes that local Basque dialects are tools for self-positioning as an ‘authentic’ voice in Instagram chat, but standard Batua, is empowering at a higher scale on Timelines, in which the same speakers use it for a more credible translocal voice.

Intersecting where? The multi-scalar contextual embeddedness of intersectional entrepreneurs

ABSTRACT We explore the experiences of LGBT* ethnic minority entrepreneurs, their changing locations and their entrepreneurial activities. Using a unique mixed-method approach which collected empirical data from Germany and the Netherlands, the paper combines an ethnographic fieldwork of intersectional entrepreneurs, community activists and policy-makers with an original survey with LGBT* customers. Our findings contribute to understanding of intersectionality by revealing the role played by the contextualized embeddedness of intersectional entrepreneurs at the different geographic scales of supranational, national, regional and inter and intra-urban. While such embeddedness frames the challenges they face, it also provides opportunities for intersectional entrepreneurs. Using a multi-scalar perspective, this paper delivers a spatially contextual perspective of entrepreneurial diversity and provides a framework to analyse the complex issues and contexts with which intersectional entrepreneurs are both confronted and embedded within. This paper contributes to refining the spatial context of entrepreneurship which has gained attention in recent studies of entrepreneurship and regional development. The paper responds to a call for gender entrepreneurship scholars to contribute to understanding of intersectional entrepreneurship. Finally, this study goes beyond the binary view of female migrant entrepreneurship by adopting a more gender diverse lens which considers the experiences of LGBT* entrepreneurs from ethnic minorities.

Up-scaling social innovation in asylum adjudication: the case of the Migrantes project in Sicily

Italy, as other European countries, saw a dramatic increase in international protection claims, heavily impacting the workload of Italian lower courts entitled to re-examine refusal decisions on asylum. The Court of Catania, in Sicily, was the most affected by this situation due to its geographical position, so that in 2016 it registered an increase of 514% in its new proceedings related to international protection. This surge in asylum claims affected the proper functioning of the judiciary and the whole asylum policy, as claims remained unsolved for a long time. In order to face these challenges, from 2015 to 2017 the project Migrantes, funded by the European Social Fund, was developed in the Court of Catania with the aim to better organise and speed up judicial procedures concerning asylum claims, the first and crucial stage of the refugee’s integration process. The present article offers an analysis of the project through the lens of the Social Innovation framework, adopting a multi-scalar perspective. In particular, it shows the innovative solutions adopted by the local court, the opportunity structures existing at local, regional, national and EU levels. Moreover, it focuses on the consolidation process that followed up-scaling dynamics and on the factors facilitating it.

New path capture. Insights from the diversification process in mining regions

Current literature on regional diversification emphasizes the importance of nonlocal linkages for new path development in peripheral regions. This is particularly relevant in mining areas due to the risk of technological lock-in caused by their high specialization in extractive activity. We combined the Evolutionary Economic Geography and Global Production Networks frameworks and suggested the notion of “path capture” to critically assess the prospects of benefiting from path creation by extensive nonlocal linkages in a peripheral region. To understand new path capture, we conducted a case study on Antofagasta, the main mining region in Chile, with a multiscalar perspective. The primary data in our analysis were obtained from in-depth interviews and the secondary data were retrieved from diverse sources. Our results show that mining regions face the risk of creating new paths that are not territorially embedded but captured by external actors.

Exploring alternative economic pathways: a comparison of foundational economy and Doughnut economics

A number of intersecting crises are currently ongoing at multiple scales, including increasing inequality, environmental degradation, and climate destabilization, as well as new surges of populism and mounting public health threats. These emergencies question our economic model of past decades and provoke a rethinking of the general approach to economic policy from a multi-scalar perspective. In this article, we compare two approaches aiming to rethink economic development policy: foundational economy and Doughnut economics, and consider if and how they complement each other. We conclude that the two approaches are potentially complementary, most prominently in their call for high-income countries to refocus from growth per se to purpose-driven economic strategies that prioritize public services and redistribute incomes. However, they differ in respect to their geographical focus, environmental concerns, and application. To properly address tradeoffs between social needs and environmental effects, foundational scholarship would benefit from deeper engagement with the socioenvironmental perspective presented in Doughnut economics, which stresses the need to consider human-nature interlinkages. In sum, combining different aspects of the two approaches promises to provide a more robust response to contemporary challenges, especially for local policy making.

Moving Toward an Inclusive Housing Policy?: Migrants’ Access to Subsidized Housing in Urban China

ABSTRACT China is rapidly urbanizing, with hundreds of millions of migrants leaving villages for cities. Under the discriminatory Household Registration (Hukou) System, migrants have been denied urban welfare benefits. The Chinese government has been promoting inclusive urbanization with significant policy changes in recent decades, yet its impact on migrants is not clear. This article examines whether housing is becoming more inclusive to migrants in Chinese cities. A review of recent policy changes at both central and local levels shows that although central housing policy is becoming more inclusive of migrants, local governments have largely remained exclusionary and exercise selective inclusion—allowing only migrants who meet additional, strict requirements to access subsidized housing. The empirical analyses, using two waves of the China Migrants Dynamic Survey, reveal that few migrants have access to subsidized housing despite the policy changes. Institutional barriers continue to exclude migrants from subsidized housing, although many barriers have become less important over time. It is clear that housing discrimination persists, and housing inclusion remains a distant dream for most migrants in China. This research highlights exclusion based on an important but uncommon birth-ascribed status defined by the government and provides a multiscalar perspective on the inclusion of domestic migrants.

Foreword: Territorial governance in the Western Balkans: Multi-Scalar approaches and perspectives

Since the beginning of the 1990s, the Western Balkans have embarked on a complex path of transition and societal transformation, that was intended to eventually lead to their integration into the European Union. The pace of this process has, however, varied, with some countries already having acquired membership, while others still struggling. Territorial governance plays a particularly important role in this process, as the internal cohesion of the region is key to its successful integration into the EU. However, knowledge on territorial governance in the Western Balkans is still limited and fragmented. This special issue aims to shed some light on the matter, discussing territorial governance contexts and practices in the Western Balkans from a multi-scalar perspective. This editorial serves as an introduction to the special issue, framing its context and guiding the reader through the articles that follow.

Competitive Europeanisation, Transnational Production and a Multiscalar Perspective on Social Policy in Europe

AbstractThe article discusses social policy with regard to the multiscalar competitive architecture of Europeanisation. The basic thesis is that the foundational logic of contemporary Europeanisation must be understood as a logic of economic integration via multiscalar socio-political fragmentation. For such an analysis, a critical political economy of Europeanisation is necessary, more precisely a labour-oriented European political economy of scale. I argue that existing regime-competition debates need to be broadened in two ways: First, social and economic geography, especially the concepts of scale, rescaling and glocalisation should be included. Such an expansion enables grasping that socio-political fragmentation not only encompasses national welfare systems, but cuts through them as well. Second, labour and production processes have to be brought back into the frame of competitive Europeanisation, to bring the extent of the Europeanisation social crisis into view.

The body, the house and the city: the territorialities of black women in Brazil

This article presents a discussion on the relationship between territoriality and intersectionality based on the experience of Black Brazilian women throughout the historical process that has triggered a long trajectory of struggle against racism and sexism. Bibliographical and documentary research has been used in order to discuss the territories of the body, the house and the city, understood as spaces of oppression and resistance. While these analytical categories have received considerable attention, especially within the Black feminist movement itself, few studies have explicitly or thoroughly addressed the relationship between intersectionality and territoriality based on an expanded conception of territory that goes from the body through to the city. Reflecting upon these concepts as a collective unit and through a multi-scalar perspective may help to provide greater visibility to the protagonist spaces of Black Brazilian women in their struggle for reparation, recognition and the right to exist.