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Scale is an important concept. It works in geography, architecture, urbanism and a number of other areas. It also works in the 'real world' of humans where it organizes societies and fuel politics. Scale gather people in collectives, as well as it works a political force for pitting them against one another. Hence scale is far from neutral. In this paper, we want to critically challenge an understanding of scale as something fixed, structural, obdurate, and ordered. Rather we encourage a thinking of scale as something related to fluidity, mobility, networks, and continuums. Rethinking scale along these lines is important for the academic understanding of the world, as well as it is key to many of the global and planetary challenges of the immediate future. This will be discussed with reference to the notion of 'Critical Zone' at the end of the paper.

Departing from the narrow geographical focus often characterising urban research under the superdiversity umbrella, this article situates the study of superdiversity within the broader context of unequal power relations and resource allocation in the postindustrial city. Focusing on backlash narratives in six neighbourhoods in three European cities, the article demonstrates how forms and dynamics of diversity are affected by the broader urban context in ways that differ both between and within cities. More systematic use of a multiscalar view would therefore be highly beneficial to future research on superdiversity.

How is the width of the pavement shaping the urban experience? How is the material design of transport infrastructure and mobile technology affording social interaction in everyday life spaces? How are people inhabiting these spaces with their bodies and in accordance to social and cultural norms? These are some of the questions that this book raises in order to explore how the design of mobile sites and situations affect people's everyday life. The book takes point of departure in the author's book 'Staging Mobilities' (Routledge, 2013) in which it is argued that mobility is much more than simple movements of people, goods, and information 'from A to B'. Accordingly, the way people, goods, and information moves shapes the way we understand our built environment, other consociates, and ourselves. The book contributes with a new and critical-creative gaze on what might seem to be trivial and mundane acts of moving in the city. 'Designing Mobilities' is based on more than a decade of academic research by Professor of Urban Theory, Ole B. Jensen and a must-read for students and scholars with an interest in urban studies, urban design, architecture, urban planning, transport planning and geography, urban geography, anthropology, design studies, interaction design, and urban sociology

The challenges facing global ecologies and lifeforms (human and non-human) are cascading at present. There are various intersecting forms of crisis, from biodiversity over climate change to massive refugee patterns, inequities, and pandemics. Even though there is only 'one world' in the sense of one globe with 'no outside', living species have probably never found themselves in more segregated ecologies within the Earth's 'critical zone' before. From new 'geo-social classes' over stranded migrant populations to voluntary isolation by the super-rich, planetary co-existence seem in peril. And yet, it is all intertwined, albeit in complex and multi-scalar ways. In this paper the mobilities of matter, humans, goods, and information will be understood on the background of the techno-Anthropocene. This is then seen as the designed, mediatized, technologically framed artificial ontologies of planetary existence. The contemporary global condition is thus defined by the 'made', designed, artificial, and technological to an extend that may qualify the diagnosis of the Anthropocene with the prefix 'techno'. Acts of 'world making' and mobilities design renders new lines of demarcation between those who move and those who do not, as well as between those who move on a voluntary basis versus those living lives of forced mobility. The paper addresses the ways in which we might re-think and re-design such troubled materialities of world-making and mobilities seeing 'mobility justice' and planetary co-existence as key goals. This means to engage in a critical-creative reimagining of scales, territories, mobilities, and inviting to techno-utopian and democratized visions of different futures.