Mapping Scales of Change: Attending to Scale Across and Through Practices

Abstract

Across the social sciences, scale is often understood as the level, size, or scope at which social phenomena are studied, measured, or governed. Practice theory has long been uneasy with such scalar distinctions, seeking to move beyond dominant micro–macro divides. Rather than abandoning scale, this paper asks what it might mean to think in terms of scales of change. Scales of change are conceptualised as the reach, rhythm, and organisation through which practices extend across timespaces and persist, adapt, or falter. The argument is developed through a cartographic sensibility that decouples mapping from representation and approaches it instead as a situated, processual practice of tracing relations between practices, materials, and temporal-spatial arrangements. Mapping operates as an of-the-moment practice that provisionally orders relations, making some trajectories of change visible while leaving others obscure. A cartographic exercise on multi-local dwelling is used as an illustrative case to explore how different ways of tracing practices render different scales of change perceptible. The paper develops a conceptualisation of scale as emergent from practice and shows how shifts in scale reconfigure what becomes visible as change, who can recognise it, and how it can be acted upon.