Urban Policy Mobilities Research: Introduction to a Debate

An increasing number of scholars are focusing attention on the circulation of urban policies and the concept of ‘policy mobilities’. This collection of short commentaries identifies emerging areas of interest and contention for urban policy mobilities researchers. Exploring issues from conceptual dualisms and topological thinking to interdisciplinarity and slow methodologies, the commentaries offer refinements and suggest new pathways for urban policy mobilities research in the future.     

A Springtime Journey to the Soviet Union: Postwar Planning and Policy Mobilities through the Iron Curtain

This article builds upon a relatively small but growing literature in geography, planning and cognate disciplines that seeks to understand the variegated geographies and histories of policy mobilities. The article uses a case study of an exchange trip between town planners in the Soviet Union and the UK between 1957 and 1958. It focuses on the experiences of the British planners in the Soviet Union and sets the tour within the wider context of a fluctuating and sometimes turbulent history of Anglo‐Soviet politics, travels and connections. In doing this, the article makes three arguments: first, there is much to be gained by bringing together the geography‐dominated policy mobilities literature with that on exchanges and visits by architects, engineers and planners. Secondly, the greater sensitivity to the histories of policy mobilities allows contemporary studies to be contextualized in the longer history of organized learning between different urban professions. Thirdly, despite the long history of policy mobilities, what differentiates the current era from previous eras is the prominent ‘knowledge intermediary’ roles now played by consultancies and think tanks. As the article will demonstrate, it was branches of government and professional bodies, rather than consultancies and think tanks, that tended to dominate such roles previously.     

Thinking Through Dualisms in Urban Policy Mobilities

The growing use of the notion of ‘policy mobilities’ to conceptualize how policy is made and moved across and among cities and urbanized regions has led to worthwhile insights, but has also encouraged some critiques. Many of these address certain dualisms that seem to undergird the policy mobilities approach. This essay engages with three of these apparent dualisms—success/failure, presence/absence and mobilities/immobilities—and argues that while they must be treated with care, they should not be dismissed or expunged a priori. Rather, we argue that there is utility in conceptualizing urban policy mobilities through relational dyads, rather than oppositional dualisms. If studies of policy mobilities, urban or otherwise, are to maintain their momentum, success, failure, presence, absence, mobilities and immobilities should be understood as being intertwined, mutually constituting and reinforcing elements of policymaking.     

‘Arriving At’ Urban Policies: The Topological Spaces of Urban Policy Mobility

Spatial vocabularies are stretched to their limits by the complexities of policy mobilities. Using the example of city‐wide strategic policymaking in Johannesburg, this essay argues for an enrichment of our vocabularies for appreciating how wider circuits of urban policy shape localized policy outcomes. Rather than tracing policies until they arrive somewhere, a more nuanced spatiality of policy mobility emerges when considering how policies are 'arrived at'. Thus policy influences can, for example, be ephemeral and recursive, international but already present in localities, have many simultaneous origins, and be folded into a relatively amorphous but specific policy blend. Drawing on John Allen's account of topological space, the essay indicates how both a more subtle spatiality and a more open politics of policy formation would emerge from turning the analysis of policy mobilities on its head in this way.     

San Francisco Through Bogotá’s Eyes: Leveraging Urban Policy Change through the Circulation of Media Objects

This article connects two emerging debates in urban studies—the need to pay more attention to the role of nonhuman actors in urban planning and the ways in which media objects affect urban politics and planning—by examining how a video on Bogotá’s car‐free Ciclovía program facilitated the adoption and implementation of a similar program in San Francisco. The analysis shows that media objects have the capacity to act as fulcrums in processes of leveraging urban policy change owing to their potential to alter urban governance structures. The article analyzes the digital storytelling and ‘eye‐opening’ practices through which the video enabled policy changes to be implemented in San Francisco, while also tracing the local and transnational actors, networks and agendas that were involved in the production and circulation of the video through digital archival research and multi‐sited fieldwork. In doing so, it shows the active role that media objects play in shaping urban policymaking processes and provides an example of a relational methodology for studying the digital materialities through which urban policy ideas increasingly circulate.     

Defensible Space on the Move: Revisiting the Urban Geography of Alice Coleman

This article traces the movement of the concept of ‘defensible space’ from New York City in the 1970s, where it was developed by the Canadian architect/planner Oscar Newman, to London in the 1980s and into design interventions in British public housing in the 1990s, through British geographer Alice Coleman, who acted as an especially powerful transfer agent. In focusing on this urban design ‘concept’ on the move we contribute to existing scholarship on policy mobility and city building in a number of ways. First, we explore an instance of the movement/mobility of a planning concept in a historical period (the recent past) largely overlooked to date. Secondly, we demonstrate that this movement was the result of a disaggregated series of expert knowledge transfers and localized translations of pre‐policy expert knowledge, generated through university‐based research work and networks. We theorize this instance of urban planning mobility by way of the interlinked insights offered by the sociology of science and policy‐mobilities literatures. As this is an instance of university research shaping public policy it also offers an opportunity to reflect upon the meaning of ‘evidence‐based policy’ and the impact agenda in contemporary higher education.     

Planning Histories and Practices of Circulating Urban Knowledge

This symposium creates and stimulates new dialogue and cross‐disciplinary exchange between planning theorists and geographers in researching the transfer of urban policy and planning models, ideas and techniques. The symposium challenges a restricted historical focus in much of the emerging geographical literature on urban policy mobilities by drawing on a rich tradition within planning history of exploring and documenting the trans‐urban travel of planning ideas and models over the last 150 years. It is argued that this longer‐term perspective is required to highlight important historical continuities and institutional legacies to contemporary urban policy circuits and pathways and to question what is particularly new, distinct and innovative about an intensification in the travel of urban ideas, plans and policies over the past decade — and the accompanying scholarly interest in them. The symposium also uses the emphasis on particular details and specific experiences within planning histories to foreground and develop approaches, particularly from recent geographical scholarship, that investigate the contingent and embodied practices and wider epistemic contexts that enable — or hinder — contemporary policy transfer.     

Comparative Urbanism and the ‘Asian City': Implications for Research and Theory

While voices in the comparative urbanism literature call for researchers to approach comparison with more experimental and critical methodologies, there remains no consensus on how to design and realize these studies. This essay examines the implications of comparative urbanism for researching the ‘Asian City'. Given the critique of existing modes of comparison embedded in recent calls for a new comparative urbanism, researchers are faced with a number of pressing questions: How do we approach this ‘regional' topic in a way that both resists categorizing the ‘Asian City' as an exotic ‘other', elevating it onto a mythical pedestal, yet appreciates its differences, localisms and unique ‘cosmopolitan vernacular' (Clifford, 1997; Werbner and Modood, 1997)? This essay thus highlights the multiple challenges of applying the comparative lens to the ‘Asian City', arguing that broader conceptualizations of the ‘Asian City' help to address the dangers in isolating Asian research into its own canon of parochial urban theory and offering a greater diversity of possibilities for justifying case selection in comparative approaches. In doing so, we hope that this essay responds to the comparative turn by illuminating to some extent its inherent complexity and methodological challenges.     

Food Deserts and Real‐Estate‐Led Social Policy

Since the early 2000s in the United States, food deserts—neighborhoods in which households have limited geographic access to full‐service supermarkets or grocery stores— have become conceptually central in public policy research on food security. Analyzing this phenomenon from a ‘policy mobility’ perspective, this article traces the food desert's emergence in policy discourse, locating it within an entrepreneurial social policy paradigm that privileges real estate development over direct economic relief. In the context of property‐led anti‐poverty efforts, the identification and mapping of food deserts catalyzes a logic that leads to subsidy to grocery store development in low‐income areas (or ‘fresh food financing’), while at the same time officials are cutting programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps), which directly supplements household food budgets. The article contributes to widening critical discussion of the food desert paradigm and the policy interventions with which it is associated. It calls on urban researchers and practitioners to reframe discussions of food access and nutrition around the shortage of basic income and a need for higher wage floors.     

Move Your Research From The Ivy Tower To The Board Room: A Primer On Action Research For Academics,Consultants, And Business Executives

Today there is a large divide between the vast majority of management research that is conducted and the opportunities for doing work that is useful for both research and practice. Action research offers a great opportunity to bridge the divide, with benefits for all involved. For academic researchers, action research can increase access to important research sites that otherwise would remain off‐limits, while simultaneously increasing the relevance and scope of the research issues addressed. For researchers and practitioners who work in organizations, and for external consultants, action research offers a way to scientifically evaluate important organizational issues using scientific methods. These methods provide a type of external validity and support for actions that otherwise could be dismissed as representing a biased internal agenda. Moreover, internal researchers who engage in action research enable the sharing of insights that can benefit practitioners in other organizations as well as the research community. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

THE INFLUENCE OF PHILANTHROPIC FOUNDATIONS ON CITY GOVERNMENT INNOVATION

In this study I examine the role of philanthropic foundations in stimulating city government innovation. Reduced budgets and rising consumer demands are challenging organizational capacity in government, prompting government officials to recognize the need for innovation to improve policies, programmes and practices. This empirical study draws upon qualitative interviews and policy reports to generate comparative case studies on three city governments in England: Bristol, Manchester and Newcastle. It builds on work in urban studies and policy mobilities that reveals how foundations can influence urban agendas, finding that philanthropic foundations engage with city governments through three different types of collaboration: direct provision of financial resources, exchange of non-financial resources with city governments and indirect engagements. Philanthropic foundations are blending financial resources and less tangible provision of space and time to enable city governments to experiment with new ideas, policies and ways of working. The fusion of non-governmental resources provides city governments with the capacity to act, and city governments often use non-governmental funding for riskier projects and for projects that may not have taken place if public funding had been used. Through these different collaborations and by deploying a suite of interventions and methods, philanthropic foundations stimulate product, service, process, conceptual and governance innovation in city governments.     

Policy Mobilities and Interdisciplinary Engagement

This essay explores the nature and potential of interdisciplinarity in the expanding body of research on the circulation of policies between places. It focuses on the policy mobilities literature, highlighting its geographical underpinnings as well as its links to, and divergences from, literature beyond geography, in particular the political science‐led work on policy transfer. Acknowledging the potential downfalls of interdisciplinarity, it calls for increased conversations and co‐working between geographers, political scientists and other social scientists to explore the topic further.     

Mathis and Zech's 'Empirical Test' of Land Value Taxation

A bstract . The Land Value Tax , which proposes that governments raise their revenues largely from taxes on the annualized economic rent of land , has been projected into current debate by recent studies and by political debate in at least half a dozen Pennsylvania cities. An effort to measure its effects o n building construction and renovation was made by two Pennsylvania economists, E. f. Mathis and C. E. Zech. Under criticism, they granted that their conclusion that there was no evidence that urban development was stimulated was tentative and debatable. The effort was valuable in that it highlighted some of the pitfalls of this kind of research. In this area, researchers must try to avoid mis-specification of variables, wrong choice of flow or stock data, employment of oversimplified economic hypotheses. Public decision makers should be informed about inappropriate model specification and structure, input data deficiencies, and inadequate econometric analysis for urban policy determination.     

Licensing,Popular Practices and Public Spaces: An Inquiry via the Geographies of Street Food Vending

The socio‐legal technology of licensing is one of the primary tools governments use to manage spaces and practices deemed risky or threatening to public order. Licensing requirements thus play a crucial role in shaping routine experiences in public space as well as the trajectories of emerging forms of public life. Yet licensing laws have largely been ignored in critical urban scholarship: too often concerned with the interpretation and critique of popular practices and public spaces, the mundane operations of urban governance are often left to practitioners and policy researchers. This article demonstrates how paying closer attention to licensure can provide valuable and unexpected insights into matters of social equality, urban amenity and economic opportunity. It does so through a comparative inquiry into practices of street food vending in New York City, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon. Drawing on ethnographic study and interviews, the article demonstrates how licensing can be involved in the production of quite peculiar and unjust geographies of practice, but also how shifts in popular culture can force a reconsideration of taken‐for‐ granted laws. In conclusion, it is argued that a focus on licensing offers a productive pathway for new forms of critical urban research and provides a potential point of leverage in efforts to configure better and more democratic forms of urban public life.     

住宅市场与城市经济互动机理研究综述与展望

认为住宅市场与城市经济体系之间的双向作用关系,是目前在理论研究和实践中亟需解决的热点问题;建立了住宅市场与城市经济互动机理的研究框架,并分别介绍了城市经济对住宅市场的影响效应和住宅市场对城市经济的反向作用机制近期的研究成果;依据我国目前该领域的研究现状,提出了在我国进行住宅市场与城市经济互动机理研究的建议.     

Location decisions of knowledge-based entrepreneurs: Why some Catalan KISAs choose to be rural?

Entrepreneurship has currently become an important element of economic development and innovation policy. In this context, the promotion of knowledge-based firms has become the norm, even in rural areas. Thus, the study presented in this paper analyses the variables that influence the choice of location made by rural and urban knowledge intensive service activity firms (KISA, hereafter). The results of the quantitative study allows for important policy making recommendations, but also offers significant contributions for entrepreneurship and regional development researchers, as well as practical insights for entrepreneurs.     

MACROPRUDENTIAL POLICY – A LITERATURE REVIEW

The recent financial crisis has highlighted the need to go beyond a purely micro approach to financial regulation and supervision. As a consequence, the number of policy speeches, research papers and conferences that discuss a macro perspective on financial regulation has grown considerably. The policy debate is focusing in particular on macroprudential tools and their usage, their relationship with monetary policy, their implementation and their effectiveness. Macroprudential policy has recently also attracted considerable attention among researchers. This paper provides an overview of research on this topic. We also identify important future research questions that emerge from both the literature and the current policy debate.     

‘It's Not Going to be Suburban,It's Going to be All Urban’: Assembling Post‐suburbia in the Toronto and Chicago Regions

Urban and suburban politics are increasingly intertwined in regions that aspire to be global. Powerful actors in the Chicago and Toronto regions have mobilized regional space to brand rescaled images of the urban experience, but questions remain as to who constructs and who can access the benefits of these revised spatial identities. Local political interests have tended to be obfuscated in the regional milieu, most problematically in the spaces between the gentrified inner cities, privileged growth nodes, and the glamorized suburban subdivisions and exurban spaces beyond the city limits. This article analyses how socio‐spatial changes in post‐suburbanizing urban fringes contribute to the way regions are being reconfigured and reimagined. Guided by current debates at the intersection of assemblage theory and critical urban political economy, our analysis demonstrates how socio‐technical infrastructures, policy mobilities and political economic relations are spatially aligned, sustained and dissolved in splintering North American agglomerations. Particular attention is paid to issues of urban transportation and connectivity in uncovering multifaceted modes of suburbanism that now underlie the monistic imagery of the globalized region. Emergent regionalized topologies and territoriality blur conventional understandings of city–suburban dichotomies in extended urban areas that are now characterized by polycentric post‐suburban constellations. In terms of their substance and functionality, ‘real existing' regions are currently re‐territorialized as complex assemblages that are embedded in a neoliberalizing political economy whose politics and identities are only beginning to be revealed.     

Accounts from behind the Curtain: History and Geography in the Critical Analysis of Urban Theory

This article seeks to contribute to the debate on the proposal to decentre urban theory and to develop postcolonial urban studies, and on the related issue of the geography of the production and circulation of knowledge. It focuses on how scholars writing about post‐socialist cities explain why their sub‐field has so far contributed little to urban theory, and it proposes an alternative—historically informed—perspective on the issue. Based on an analysis of the ties and exchanges that existed between urban studies in Central and Eastern Europe and ‘West‐based' urban theory and research during the state‐socialist period, this article argues that the recognized current position of research on post‐socialist cities in relation to international urban scholarship has important historical parallels with the period prior to 1989. The article thus underlines the need to include a historically informed analysis of geography of knowledge production in critical thinking about urban theory and in the project of cosmopolitan urban studies. The capacities of researchers in different localities to contribute to this project are various and shaped by the history of the discipline. The conditions and perspectives in and from which researchers contribute to urban theory should therefore be taken into account if the project of cosmopolitan urban studies is to succeed.     

Deliberative Democracy and Local Governance: Towards a New Agenda

Over the last decade scholars of urban governance and deliberative democracy have produced large literatures. Theorists of deliberative democracy have conceptualized the normative implications of ‘deliberation’ and explored real‐world decision‐making arrangements that approximate those ideals. Scholars of urban governance have theorized and explored the outcomes of different institutional arrangements for the governance of cities and regions. Whereas empirical democratic theory has increasingly been interested in local contexts, researchers of urban governance have been progressively more concerned about the implications of emerging patterns of urban governance for democratic accountability. However, despite the recent mutual interest among researchers in both fields, debates within these literatures frequently ignore each other and are not systematic. This introductory article reviews recent contributions that have fruitfully investigated the tension between deliberation and governance in a more systematic fashion, and concludes that our understanding of those issues is significantly improved by a research agenda that pursues an integrated approach.