Framing Space and Time in the City: Urban Policy and the Politics of Spatial and Temporal Scale

This article seeks to analyze urban politics through the lens of the social constructionist approach to scale. This approach views scale not as a set of pre-given, natural, and immutable levels upon which social life occurs. Rather, it regards scale as a fluid context for and product of power relations in society. The article argues that urban politics is frequently characterized by political strategies that frame reality in terms of scale. Agents of the state, capital, and civil society all engage in the politics around competing scalar framings. As a result, the politics of scale has important but contingent material consequences. The article illustrates these points through a case study of the politics that surrounded the development of a new neighborhood planning initiative in Austin, Texas in the late 1990s. Based on this case study, the article also argues that while geographers studying the politics of scale tend to explain it solely in terms of spatial scale, scalar politics in the urban context frequently combines framings of spatial and temporal scale. This simultaneous framing of space and time in the city has important, if sometimes unpredictable, implications for policy and politics. The reconfiguration of urban governance in recent decades has, among other things, entailed a reshuffling of the locations of power among the institutions of the state, capital, and civil society and the opening up of the urban policy-making process. An important aspect of this has been capital’s increased degree of direct control over the formulation of urban policy, e.g., through public-private partnerships (Harvey, 1989). This ongoing restructuring is also associated with changes in the ways that groups beyond the state and capital are involved in policy formulation. In this regard, there has been a growing attention to, or at least rhetoric of, broad-based inclusion in the US urban policy-making arena. Ideally, this means that neighborhood organizations, environmental campaigners, advocates for the poor, and many other activist groups are to have a seat at the decisionmaking table. This goal has led local government staff and urban planners to adopt a wide range of alternative decision-making techniques, such as consensus-based processes and collaborative visioning (Walzer, 1996; Woodmansee, 1994). This changing policy-making *Direct correspondence to: Eugene J. McCann, Department of Geography, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210–1361. E-mail: [email protected] JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS, Volume 25, Number 2, pages 159–178. Copyright # 2003 Urban Affairs Association All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISSN: 0735-2166. context means that political actors intent on shaping policy face changing opportunities and constraints that often necessitate the modification of their arguments and political practices. The study of urban politics focuses on uncovering these changing political practices and identifying the key elements of change. My purpose is to consider how a burgeoning literature in critical human geography can provide useful insights into the contemporary practice of urban politics. This geographical literature is concerned with how spatial scale (the local, national, global, etc.) is socially constructed and, therefore, imbued with power. Scale is conceived not as a set of pre-given and immutable levels upon which human life is lived, but as a socially constructed way of representing reality and dividing the world for specific political purposes (Marston, 2000). This social constructionist approach focuses on the political work that scale (or the idea of a world divided into scales) can perform and the contests that surround attempts to divide the world into one set of scales as opposed to another. From this perspective, the politics surrounding changes in contemporary urban policy-making is a politics of scale. In this politics, scale is not a neutral background. Rather, it is a discursive frame used by competing interests to define or redefine the appropriate location of political power and the territorial extent of specific policies and regulations (Delaney & Leitner, 1997). The term discursive frame refers to the process through which interest groups involved in urban politics seek to convince others of the merits of their particular understanding of how the world is, how it should be, and the policies that will make it better in the future. Social movement theorists argue that this political persuasion works through frames— simplifications of the world that selectively identify and attach meaning to certain actions, experiences, and events—for the purpose of influencing politics and policy (Snow & Benford, 1992; Tarrow, 1992; and see Nash, 2000). For instance, Tarrow (1992) argues that the 1960s civil rights movement was successful in creating a broad base of support among blacks and middle class whites because it framed the complex social and political landscape of the decade in terms of a simple and powerful theme—rights—that resonated with shared values held by the majority of coalition members. The emphasis on rights as a meaningful theme was a discursive strategy because discourse ‘‘refers to all the ways in which we communicate with one another, to that vast network of signs, symbols, and practices through which we make our world(s) meaningful to ourselves and to others’’ (Gregory, 1994a, p. 11, Barnes & Duncan, 1992). Discursive framing draws on certain aspects of materiality and experience of everyday life to focus the attention of a wide range of people on a common concern so as to achieve a particular political purpose. Drawing on a case study of the implementation of a neighborhood planning framework in Austin, Texas, I argue that urban politics is frequently characterized by the discursive framing of reality in terms of scale. The politics emerge through various actors’ attempts to frame reality in different ways that promote their interests and enable them to implement policy and mobilize politically. As a result, the politics of scale has important but contingent material consequences. I also suggest that the politics of scale is about more than spatial scale (with which geographers have been most concerned in recent years). Discursive framings of scale in US cities are articulated simultaneously in spatial and temporal terms where discussions of ‘‘our neighborhood’’ and ‘‘our city’’ are interwoven with appeals to time of residence in a neighborhood and longstanding cultural connections to a city. This framing of space and time in the city has important, if unpredictable, implications for policy and politics. The next section will present a more detailed account of contemporary changes in urban governance and their relationships to constructionist perspectives on scale. The subsequent section will provide some details of the rapidly changing context in which the 160 | JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS | Vol. 25/No. 2/2003