Urban policy mobilities in Urban Geography: in retrospect and in prospect

ABSTRACT

This virtual collection introduces and discusses urban policy mobilities contributions published in Urban Geography. Emerging in the very early 2000s, this inter-disciplinary field challenged work on policy transfer. Instead, it drew upon existing contributions from architecture, history and planning, to argue from a processual, relational and social-constructionist approach to theorizing the making of policies mobiles, what happens when they are in motion and under what conditions they stop moving.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban policy mobilities
• policy transfer
• public policy

This is an editorial for a virtual collection on urban policy mobilities, which can be accessed at https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/rurb20/collections/Urban_policy_mobilities.

How best to introduce a virtual collection of Urban Geography on the theme of urban policy mobilities? Carefully, I suggest! In the early years of the twenty-first century, a relatively small number of contributions emerged out of human geography, studying welfare reform in the United Kingdom and the United States, and how something called “policy” appeared and reappeared in a diverse range of geographically discrete but perhaps relationally proximate national and urban contexts (Peck, 2001; Theodore & Peck, 1999). Perhaps not obviously at the time, they and a small number of subsequent other pieces were to lie behind the emergence of a new, inter-disciplinary field, “policy mobilities” (González, 2011; McCann, 2008; Ward, 2006). Slowly but surely. Only with the benefit of hindsight – over 20 years in the case of this editorial – have these contributions been understood as foundational.

These early contributions addressed this complicated and nebulous thing called “policy” in a manner unlike those previous studies in human geography, dating back to the 1960s. Eschewing technical evaluations on the one hand and, on the other, questions around geographers being more involved in the making of public policy (Dorling & Shaw, 2002; Harvey, 1974), instead it questioned the taken-for-granted assumptions in political science over how something called “policy” moved, or transferred, from one location to another. This large and still growing body of work on policy transfer continues to seek to model or to theorize the process of transfer, creating typologies of the actors and institutions involved, identifying the power relations through which it occurs, and specifying the conditions under which it occurs (Benson & Jordan, 2011; Dolowitz & Marsh, 1996, 2000, 2012; Stone, 1999). Peck (2011, p. 774) has noted this approach as “the rational-formalist tradition of work on policy transfer.”

In contrast, the work that has emerged out of human geography in the last two decades has pulled together strands of work in architectural and planning histories (Harris & Moore, 2013; Healey & Upton, 2010), cultural and social geography (Cresswell, 2010, 2011), and anthropology and social policy (Wedel et al., 2005). This generated what Peck (2011, p. 774) refers to as a set of “social-constructivist approaches.” Emerging was an alternative to that approach pursued by political scientists. Not at once, of course, but in an ad-hoc, often incoherent and incremental manner. This remains a rather loose approach, or framework though, an intellectual home for those drawing upon what perhaps at first glance seem incommensurable ontologies. For example, those working with Actor Network Theory (ANT), Science and Technology Studies (STS), as well as political economy, post-colonialism, and post-structuralism have contributed to the field. Heterogeneous might be an understatement (Jacobs, 2012). As different but overlapping contributions have emerged, there persists a still “rolling conversation” (Peck, 2011, p. 774) between an ever-growing number of intellectual and geographical vantage points. This has seen “mobilities” evolve, to capture what McCann and Ward (2012, p. 325) term “policy assemblages, mobilities and mutations” (see also, McCann & Ward, 2013). Despite important differences within this heterodox field:

[t]his approach is characterized by a concern for the actors, practices and representations that affect the (re) production, adoption and travel of policies, and the best practice models across time and space. Attention to what happens to policies while they are “in motion” is … important … since the paths traveled and the things that happen to policies along the way are just as important as the policies themselves and the places they affect. (Temenos & McCann, 2013, p. 345)

As one might expect, as this field has grown, so to have those concepts and themes that give it shape and structure. In addition to questioning the definitional basics of “policy”, the notions of absence/presence, failure/success, and mobility/movement have been subject to critical reflection and scrutiny (Baker & Temenos, 2015; McCann & Ward, 2015; Wells, 2020). Mostly using qualitative research methods, such as archives, ethnography, and semi-structured interviews, we have witnessed a still growing body of work on different areas of public policy, from crime to drugs, economic development to education, governance to housing, infrastructure to planning, and transport to welfare. “Peak” policy mobilities still seem some way off.

As part of this wider field, a strand of work specifically on urban policy mobilities has emerged, drawing upon examples from cities around the world. It has highlighted how best and good practice “models” in areas such as eco cities, smart cities, and sustainable cities have emerged (Chang, 2017; Crivello, 2015). Between locations, we have seen these circulated, analyzed, interpreted, mediated, and translated. Various digital and material infrastructures have emerged to support this connective work, using notions of inter-urban comparison, exchange, and referencing to open up for scrutiny of the political nature of global urban policymaking. In this context, over the last two decades, Urban Geography has been home to a small but growing number of papers, with more recently the publishing of a special issue in the journal (Temenos & Lauermann, 2020). This focused on the notion of “failure” and its conceptualization to date in urban policy mobility studies.

The papers selected for this virtual special collection likely say as much about me as about the wider field! It is the nature of these intellectual endeavours. Nevertheless, I want to highlight four features that run across the papers (Baker & McCann, 2020; Bok, 2020; Borén & Young, 2021; Bunnell & Das, 2010; Cleave et al., 2017; Cook & Ward, 2012; Curran & Hanson, 2005; Davidson, 2020; Graham, 2014; Guironnet, 2019; Hsu & Hsu, 2013; Kennedy, 2016; Liu, 2017; McCann, 2013; Michel, 2013; Moore et al., 2018; Moore-Cherry & Bonnin, 2020; Moser et al., 2022; Nciri & Levenda, 2020; Sigler, 2013; Swanson, 2013; Tulumello & Iapaolo, 2022; Wood, 2014). First is the emergence of an increasingly nuanced and open understanding of “time” in the making of urban policy mobilities. Many of these papers reject, either directly or indirectly, the additive and linear mode of conceiving time across the different policy stages. Instead, the emphasis is on a non-linear and rhizomatic approach with the adding, subtracting, and adding (again) of elements. Emphasis is on the incremental, incomplete, and open-ended nature of urban policy mobilities. Second, is the more than material (or more than representational?) dimension to urban policy mobilities. Much of the earlier work emphasized and focused on material dimensions. That might say as much about the ontological orientations of those in the field as say the downplaying of the affective, atmospheric, and emotional elements. Yet, as is clear in many of the papers, the bringing forth of certain policies involves a variety of types of affective and emotional work. To be believable and credible “success” (and, “failure”) rests on a sense of something that is irreducible to data or evidence, facts or figures (McKenzie, 2017). Third is the diverse urban geographies at work in their examples of policy mobilities. That it is cities in the global North that tend to generate policies more likely to travel is a sense that persists. However, there is evidence that this is slowly changing (if it was really ever the case). A complex set of inter-related geographies of comparison, of exchange, and of referencing have emerged to energize, galvanize, and facilitate the movement of policies. Fourth, and finally, these papers reinforce the widespread use of urban policy mobilities to understand public policy in a wide range of areas. As a lens onto the making of urban policy – at least pre-COVID-19 – the generality and versatility of the approach has seen its widespread uptake and usage. Have we reached the point of diminishing conceptual and methodological returns? That is unclear. What is more certain is that in Urban Geography, and the wider field with which the journal shares its name, the contribution of urban policy mobilities work continues to be been lasting and significant.