Toward a Social Ecology of Scale

Abstract

Alliances among public health, planning, and design disciplines illustrate the use of scale-based approaches to mobilize actors across space and time. Obesity prevention efforts demonstrate the use of strategies across organizational and geographical boundaries to change policies and environmental determinants that affect the level of physical activity in community settings. One framework for landscape praxis based on a social ecology of scale centers on three interrelated processes: place imaginaries, place narratives, and place polities. This trialectic highlights the possibilities for transdisciplinary practice that: (1) creates social imaginations to produce identities and give meaning, (2) produces discursive framings to legitimize particular imaginaries and identities, and (3) facilitates the formation of political communities where project identities are formed, negotiated, and mobilized toward specific goals. The obesity prevention program of the Pennsylvania Advocates for Nutrition and Activity (PANA) draws attention to social ecological approaches sensitive to various scales of social and spatial production and the possibilities for professional engagement ranging from design to policymaking.