Rescaling the transnational city: in search of a ‘trans-methodology’

This paper explores a methodology for understanding the ethnically diverse, transnational city through the lens of scale. The paper emerges from an ethnography of the economic and cultural life of Peckham Rye Lane, a multi-ethnic street in south London. We explore the effects of accelerated migrations into cities, and the rescaling of citizenship across individual, street and city spaces. A ‘trans-methodology’ is pursued not simply as a ‘how to’ challenge, but as a ‘what is at stake’ politics, where the restrictions and circuits of migration require evaluation across interrelated the spaces of the city. Scale is interpreted in both geographic and sociological dimensions: as the city-shaping processes, through which the organizations of power and the formations of culture surface or remain invisible, within distinct but connected urban spaces. The paper argues for the analytic stretch across the compendium of micro, meso and macro urban scales, without reifying one above the other.