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Distributed for University of British Columbia Press

Leviathan Undone?

Towards a Political Economy of Scale

Caught in the trap of the nation-state and frozen in postwar bloc logic, critical political economy has been found wanting when it comes to problematizing space and scale. Globalization and the rise of world cities and regions have shaken the discipline’s foundations and fostered new interest in the concept of scale. Leviathan Undone? brings together leading theorists and scholars from a variety of disciplines to develop a new language to understand the spatial restructuring that has accompanied globalization. By treating scale as the core concept of our time, these innovative, groundbreaking essays bring a new sensibility to classical and contemporary concerns in Canadian and international political economy.

380 pages | © 2009


Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction / Rianne Mahon and Roger Keil

Part 1: The Scalar Turn

1 A Thousand Leaves: Notes on the Geographies of Uneven Spatial Development / Neil Brenner

2 Is Scale a Chaotic Concept? Notes on Processes of Scale Production / Byron Miller

3 Why the Urban Question Still Matters: Reflections on Rescaling and the Promise of the Urban / Stefan Kipfer

Part 2: Political Scales

4 Avoiding Traps, Rescaling States, Governing Europe / Bob Jessop

5 Scaling Government to Politics / Warren Magnusson

6 Producing Nature, Scaling Environment: Water, Networks, and Territories in Fascist Spain / Erik Swyngedouw

7 Getting the Scale Right? A Relational Scale Politics of Native Title in Australia / Richard Howitt

Part 3: Re/Productive Scales

8 The Cult of Urban Creativity / Jamie Peck

9 State Spaces of “After Neoliberalism”: Co-Constituting the New Zealand Designer Fashion Industry / Wendy Larner, Nick Lewis, and Richard Le Heron

10 Public Health and the Political Economy of Scale: Implications for Understanding the Response to the 2003 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) Outbreak in Toronto / S. Harris Ali and Roger Keil

11 Of Scalar Hierarchies and Welfare Redesign: Child Care in Four Canadian Cities / Rianne Mahon

Part 4: The Scale of Movements

12 The Spatiality of Contentious Politics: More than a Politics of Scale / Helga Leitner and Eric Sheppard

13 Regional Resistances in an Exurban Region: Intersections of the Politics of Place and the Politics of Scale / Gerda R. Wekerle, L. Anders Sandberg, and Liette Gilbert

14 Revolutionary Cooks in the Hungry Ghetto: The Black Panther Party’s Biopolitics of Scale from Below / Nik Hey

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