Commensurability, COVID, and the domestic: A note on scalarity

Abstract

This commentary offers a note on scalarity and rescaling during the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, it returns to the 2001 Marston/Brenner debate regarding the “limits to scale,” focusing particularly on how to conceptualise the domestic as scale rather than as place, territory, locale, or area. It argues that while plurality is pivotal for distinguishing scale from other geographic concepts, vertical relationality is only one axis along which this might be sufficiently accomplished. I raise the issue of scale's horizontal commensurability as a complementary means of approaching the domestic scale in the dramatic upheavals wrought by the current pandemic.