Rancière, Aesthetics and the Politics of the City-Scale

This chapter explores how Rancière’s aesthetic framework can help overcome an impasse around the scale debate within human geography—namely around scale’s relative position to ontology—and in turn provide insights for rethinking the city-scale in urban studies. In particular, it identifies Rancière’s concept of the ‘distribution of the sensible’ as a way beyond this impasse, framing scales like the city-scale as part of a politically contestable, common-sense ordering of space. This perspective sees scales, and by extension the city-scale, not as fixed but as contingent social constructs that can in turn shape society and materiality. Rather than limiting political entry points, scales such as the city-scale are often the object of political struggle. Moreover, concerns that scholars can erroneously presume the city-scale, or scales more generally, can be avoided by following Rancière and focusing on moments of dissensus, where imaginaries about scale are challenged with alternatives ‘on the ground’.