Governing urbanism: Urban governance studies 1.0,2.0 and beyond

Abstract

Governance has been a key concept in urban studies since the late 1980s. This paper reflects on its use and development over the past 25 years and identifies contemporary innovations and concerns that will likely define the future of urban governance studies. The paper argues that to fully understand the impacts of governance approaches on our understanding of cities, urban regions and global urbanism, we must address how urbanism, rather than urbanisation, is governed. An attention to urbanism highlights a wider range of scholarly work on how the mutually constitutive relationships between the development of built environments and the identities, practices, struggles and opportunities of everyday social life are governed. In introducing 15 contributions from the archives of Urban Studies, the paper employs a heuristic framing – urban governance studies (UGS) 1.0, 2.0, and beyond – to show that, while governance as a contemporary critical concept gained prominence through the work of Marxian political economists concerned largely with urbanisation (UGS 1.0), other work, analysing the governance of other aspects of urbanism, including identity and citizenship (UGS 2.0), also has a significant history. The paper then points to ways in which urban governance studies grapple with future-defining challenges, such as climate change, and new framings, such as the ‘smart city’, while extending the scope of their analyses both temporally and spatially. The paper concludes by pointing to gaps and potential topics for ongoing attention.

Keywords

governance politics urban studies urbanisation urbanism

Urban studies and Urban Studies have long focused on studying the diverse and complex array of built environments and social relations that constitute urbanism. Urbanism, in this context, connotes the widest sense of the urban, addressing not only urbanisation and development but also ways of life that define urban areas in specific historical periods. An attention to urbanism, rather than simply urbanisation, helps maintain a focus on the mutually constitutive relationships between built environments and the identities, practices, struggles and opportunities of everyday social life. The concept of governance, along with its parallel, cognate, and cross-cutting concepts, is one lens through which urbanists have studied urbanism. The key question, from this general governance perspective, is not only why cities are the way they are at a particular time, or only how urban built environments, societies and political economies are shaped and reshaped in reference to wider forces and processes, but also how they are made to be the way they are, through the concerted actions of the state, other public and private institutions, social movements, civil society and the practices of everyday life.

The purpose of this Virtual Special Issue (VSI) is to highlight 15 Urban Studies articles, published from the 1990s to the current decade, as a perspective into the trajectory of urban governance studies in the past quarter century. In this introductory essay, I will highlight the papers’ contributions, their foci (conceptual and empirical), their connections and their divergences. I will reflect on the changing character of urban governance research and, in turn, highlight certain lacunae and some directions for future work.

The rise of urban governance studies: Empirical and conceptual trends

While elements, strategies and effects of government have featured in the pages of Urban Studies since its founding, work on governance per se and articles that use governance as an analytical concept appear more recently. An archival search shows that the term ‘governance’ was little used in the journal before the 1990s, with only two articles (Kristensen, 1983; Wingo, 1973) referring to it in Urban Studies’ first 25 years. No journal is an island, of course, and it is reasonable to assume that the rise in interest in governance in this journal was inspired, to a great extent, by a paper in another: Harvey’s highly influential paper on entrepreneurial governance in Geografiska Annaler B (1989). While that paper is a classic, 1989 and 1990 saw the publication of two other papers on similar themes (Clarke and Gaile, 1989; Leitner, 1990). Cities and urbanism were developing and being managed in profoundly new ways at that time and these changes were taken seriously by critical urban researchers.

The 1980s saw early stages of the institutionalisation and operationalisation of neoliberal ideology in the Global North. This neoliberalisation was intertwined with the fiscal crisis of the Keynesian welfare state and a rise in what might, in simple terms, be called ‘globalisation’ but, in more precise terms, was a:

fundamental secular shift in state–market–society relations … [involving] important new economic and social conditions and attendant problems … which cannot be managed or resolved readily, if at all, through top-down state planning or market-mediated anarchy. (Jessop, 1998: 32)

Urban regions were (and are) crucial to this restructuring, both as generators and targets of market-fundamentalist experimentation (Brenner and Theodore, 2002). Urban government, in the strict sense of formally public ‘managerial’, bureaucratic institutions, was reshaped through defunding (Harvey, 1989), being ‘broken open’ for scrutiny and critique (Rose, 1999), ‘hollowed out’ and rescaled (Jessop, 1997; Swyngedouw, 1992), and represented in new powerful ways (Martin et al., 2003).

As this process unfolded, a growing dynamism and complexity – and, perhaps, crisis-propensity – in the organisation of decision-making and policy-making emerged in the form of myriad experiments in what came to be known as ‘governance.’ In contrast to government, then:

Governance [is] an arrangement of governing beyond-the-state (but often with the explicit inclusion of parts of the state apparatus) … organised as [apparently] horizontal associational networks of private (market), civil society (usually NGO) and state actors. (Swyngedouw, 1992, 2005)

Most evident forms of governance that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, were:

New relations –‘partnerships’– among public institutions and between the public sector and a range of non-elected, or ‘quasi-non-governmental’, organisations involved in (re)developing urban areas.

A scalar reorganisation of the rights and responsibilities of the national state, with some regulatory abilities ‘up-scaled’ to supra-national institutions such as the EU or WTO (thus drawing their influence more directly into the governance of urbanism) and the parallel ‘down-scaling’ of other regulatory and distributional responsibilities to localities (often along with the responsibility to generate revenue to fund these new mandates).

Changing relationships between the state and citizens that both promised democratic benefits of increased direct participation of civil society ‘stakeholders’, reshaped longstanding understandings of rights and responsibilities, and opened up for renewed scrutiny even the most taken-for-granted notions, such as ‘public’ and ‘private’.

The related rise of ‘entrepreneurial governance’, with its attempts by the public sector to underwrite and incentivise investment through large-scale tax-break programmes and to marketise cities as commodities through place-marketing – a set of inter-related practices called the ‘New Urban Politics’ (NUP) (for valuable reviews, see Goodwin, 2009; Painter, 2009; Raco, 2009).

Urban studies in general and studies of urban politics, policy, citizenship, urbanisation and urbanism, in particular, have been profoundly shaped by the focus on these elements of governance. The history of the urban governance literature has been one that evolved from its original foundation in Marxian political economy and expanded since the 1990s to include other approaches, including neo-Foucauldian work on governmentality and Rancierian conceptualisations of the post-political.

As we will see in this VSI, the literature’s empirical concerns have been diverse. Certainly, the character, operation and location of power have been a central. In dialogue – if not always explicitly so – with long traditions of work on urban politics and power in sociology, political science and related disciplines, studies of urban governance have addressed the actors and interests that make urban policy decisions, set and control agendas, define problems and propose solutions, set the goals, character and extent of development, create or dismantle planning and other regulations of various types, seek or assert legitimacy, hold or be excluded from the ability to represent their interests and identities, define and enact what it means to be a citizen, and address existential challenges, including environmental crises.

A note on the selection of papers

Choosing which papers to represent these diverse concerns was not easy. Somewhat akin to the dilemmas of making a mixtape, ‘… there’s a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again … oh, there are loads of rules’ (Hornby, 1995: 88–89). The winnowing process was more difficult than I should admit. The original goal – overly ambitious as it turns out – was to survey how articles in the journal addressed urban politics across three general themes: governance, contest and identity. This led to a search of the journal using the Web of Science database and the following search terms: politic*, govern*, citizen* and protest*. The 150 or so results were ordered by citation counts. The number of results convinced me that a narrower focus would produce a VSI with more depth, if less scope. The review also highlighted the way that the journal has become an important forum for research on urban governance, with milestone papers published in its pages.

The final product is neither comprehensive nor perfect, of course. The next stage of the process was entirely subjective. I have tried to highlight some influential papers, others that represent early engagements with governance in the journal, and some that represent a diversity of empirical and conceptual concerns. I have also sought to identify papers that speak to one another and to feature both established scholars and some relatively junior colleagues. I have tried to range geographically beyond the North Atlantic axis, which tended to dominate the early literature. Moreover, at a time when entirely justifiable critiques of academic ‘manels’ (male-only panels) are becoming increasingly prominent, I have endeavoured to have the collection of 15 papers roughly reflect the proportion of male and female authors found in the larger sample. I have followed this guideline at least in as much as I am able to define gender by authors’ names and in full recognition of the problematic nature of such a binary framing of gender. Erasing … rethinking … loads of rules.

Studying urban governance: Fifteen contributions

If early examinations of NUP, urbanisation and entrepreneurialism, based as they were in Marxian political economy, marked a first generation of urban governance studies (‘UGS 1.0’), we are now in an a phase of UGS 2.0, in which the original conceptualisations of the phenomenon maintain great value and traction but are being augmented, challenged and exceeded by scholars intent on understanding the diverse spatial and institutional implications of how and for whom decisions about urban life are made. The following three sections describe this trajectory as it has been manifested in the pages of Urban Studies. First, I discuss studies of the political economy and governance of urban economic development, or urbanisation. The second section highlights how studies of urban governance have been, from relatively early on, about more than the study of urban development per se, and have addressed governing urbanism more generally. Finally, I point to ways in which studies of urban governance continue to be extended spatially and temporally. The continued proliferation and contestation of approaches to governance in urban studies is a positive development, worthy of ongoing engagement.

Governing urbanisation in the age of ‘partnership’

An excellent and engaging overview of work on urban politics and governance, Gordon MacLeod’s (2011) paper is an appropriate starting point for this VSI. Via a review that includes studies of urban politics since the early 1980s, he shows that the history of urbanism in the last 35 years is marked by ‘tectonic’ shifts and ‘splintering’ (a term he draws from Graham and Marvin, 2001) in the character and locations of power, politics and governance. Novel forms of privatised control are increasingly manifesting across urbanised regions (downtown Business Improvement Districts, suburban homeowners associations, etc.) and emerging simultaneously with innovative forms of decision-making and politics (public–private partnerships, collaborative planning initiatives, etc.). This splintering is accompanied by the entrenchment of an apparently depoliticised, technicised and instrumentalised urban policy-making (Swyngedouw, 2009) that was promoted, controversially, by at least one scholar in the early 1980s, who argued that ‘city governments must suspend egalitarian and redistributive objectives and concentrate wholly on investment and efficiency’ in the face of global competition (MacLeod, 2011: 2633, paraphrasing Peterson, 1981).

As engagements with governance began to appear in the pages of Urban Studies in the mid-1990s, it was clear that urbanists were critically examining and questioning the neoliberal approach advocated by Peterson and others. An early object of critique was the mantra of ‘partnership’. Annette Hastings’ (1996) discussion of partnerships between public agencies, the private sector and community groups in the regeneration and tenure diversification of public housing developments in urban Scotland notes that partnerships at the time were, despite an accompanying rhetoric of mutual transformation of partners, primarily about reeducating and reorienting the public sector and community groups to a privatist, ‘entrepreneurial’ ethos. This, she argues, is a one-sided and less than democratic process. It is an argument that resonates with MacLeod’s and Swyngedouw’s (2005) diagnoses and also with another early paper in the journal (Bassett, 1996), which also raised concerns about depoliticisation in the new governance model, despite its promises of openness and participation.

While early papers begin to provide insights into the rise of governance in specific cities, Neil Brenner (1999) argued that governance must be understood not only in its own terms and for its own consequences but, crucially, as an element of a politics of rescaling emerging in the nexus of urban and state restructuring. Thus, governance is linked not only to globalisation but to state territoriality. Brenner contributed a thoroughly argued framework for analysing and contextualising urban governance that, among other things, provided a detailed lexicon (regulation, state capacities, institutionalisation, crisis management, etc.) that allowed a sharper focus on governance’s constituent parts. A key argument he makes is that the territorial scope of ‘urban’ governance does not stop at municipal limits, but operates across and must be understood in the context of city regions: territorially extensive configurations of governance and economic activity (MacLeod, 2011). Governance, then, involves the development of new institutional relationships but also the production of new territorial relationships in the context of ongoing globalisation. This is a powerful and persuasive lens, but, of course, it is only one lens through which to understand governance. As we will see, the neo-Foucaultian notion of governmentality, among others, can also be used to analyse governance. Certainly, when they are used, other approaches reveal different aspects of the broad and, as MacLeod (2011) suggests, increasingly varied landscape of governance.

As I suggested above, the literature on urban governance made headway along a distinctly North Atlantic axis. The papers referred to above, for example, are all by UK and US authors drawing on North American and European research. There is, of course, more to the world of urban governance than Europe and North America. Presaging a more recent discussion of the merits of Global North case studies in the development of urban theory (Robinson, 2011; Roy, 2015), Fulong Wu’s (2002) contribution argues that while many of the features of governance found in Global North literatures are also evident in China, the motivation in the latter case is less about trying to accommodate globalisation and more about a turn to a market economy and related rescaling of state power. As elsewhere, the state in China is still very much involved in urban governance, but in different ways than in other contexts.

This first section of the VSI highlights a strong and, in the early years of urban governance studies, dominant theme in the literature: urbanists grappled with a new neoliberal model of governing urban regions in general and urban development and urbanisation, specifically. This neoliberalised model was and is manifest differently from place to place (Brenner and Theodore, 2002), but tends to involve the ‘entrepreneurialisation’ of urban politics, the restructuring of relations between the private and public sectors, the transformation of ‘public’ sector priorities and practices, and the fundamental reconfiguration of the built environments, land markets, labour markets and social composition of city centres and urban regions. Ian Deas’ (2014) detailed, thorough paper on the complexities of regional governance in Greater Manchester, UK, emphasises the ongoing importance of this theme in the literature. It also grapples with the question of how, why, and to what extent urban-regional governance is depoliticised, technicised, and directed toward economic competitiveness (see MacLeod, 2011).

These concerns seem to have outweighed arguments that the rise of governance might offer new opportunities for civil society to have more direct say in governing urbanism. Certainly, for Wu (2002), changes in how cities in China are governed have not produced much of a robust civil society. Yet, perhaps in many places, other registers of governance and perhaps counter-governance or ‘insurgent’ governance are visible, if viewed from different angles. Indeed, Wu (2002: 1090) calls for more ‘microscopic’ studies. I take this to indicate not necessarily the need for studies where n = 1 or studies of a single block or street (although both these approaches are perfectly valid if they logically fit the questions being asked in a particular research study) but the importance of studying both the governance of large-scale urbanisation and also the governance of urbanism or urban life and the study of relations between these registers (for example, see Derickson (2016) on the need to more strongly emphasise difference and banality in community-engaged studies of governance and Proudfoot and McCann (2008) on the role of street-level bureaucratic discretion in governing urban neighbourhoods).

Governing urbanism

Urban Studies has also highlighted research on how elements of urban life – from citizenship, political representation and participation, to identities and living spaces – are governed. Some of this work, particularly that discussing citizenship and voting, for example, is very much still about the state – even in its neoliberalised, attenuated form – while other studies more clearly show that governance is, by definition, about activities beyond the state, in the informal interactions among people in markets, housing developments and on the street.

This point is underscored by Ilda Lindell (2008) whose contribution to this collection explores the multiple types of governance practice and power relations manifest in the operation of a marketplace in Maputo, Mozambique. She argues that the marketplace is an informal site where the state is weak and much governance happens beyond it. Governance, then, must be understood as ‘a broad range of practices … that may involve various modes of power’ (Lindell, 2008: 1880). Drawing on Foucault (1980, 1994) and Allen (2004), she discusses the relations within a vendors’ association and between that group and the state, trade unions, and other traders operating outside its remit. These complex relations are a form of ‘provisional governance’, bringing to mind Simone’s (2004) accounts of African cities and resonating with his and others’ critiques of one-size-fits-all theories of urbanism emanating from the Global North.

The importance of informality and power relations among small groups of actors is also highlighted in Fatma Şenol’s (2013) paper. She details attempts by community members to become included in the local state as official neighbourhood representatives in Izmir, Turkey. The key axis of power here is gender and its relationship to governance, citizenship, family and neighbourhood social networks, and clientalism. Despite the optimistic idea that the shift to governance will produce more active and responsible citizens through participation, Şenol, in an argument that resonates with Swyngedouw’s (2005, see below), emphasises the continued social unevenness of access to powerful positions within communities and the state.

The unevenness of access to and influence on governance institutions can lead to outright exclusions, but also to partial and problematic inclusions that must be examined critically. David Bell and Jon Binnie’s (2004: 1807) exploration of ‘how sexual “others” are conscripted into the process of urban transformation and, by turn, how this city rebranding becomes part of the sexual citizenship agenda’ raises important questions about the way in which gay communities and spaces have become part of entrepreneurial marketing campaigns. They argue that the new enrolment of ‘Pride’ in urban marketing involves sexual ‘others’ and their neighbourhoods being made safe, acceptable and consumable for a more general population. This involves the regulation and production of a homonormative appropriateness, whereby elements of gay life, including, for example, the leather scene, are deemed inappropriate and their spaces are purged or marginalised. Entrepreneurial governance, then, with its need to produce marketable and consumable places within the city, carries with it demands to self-govern, in the Foucauldian sense, and the marginalisation of those falling beyond hegemonic behavioural norms. As Bell and Binnie (2004: 1816) argue, ‘the neo-liberalisation of urban politics and sexual politics has rewritten the terms by which urban sexual citizenship operates’.

Governance, then, is Janus-faced, as Erik Swyngedouw’s (2005) contribution to this VSI argues. For him, governance ‘often offer[s] the promise of greater democracy and grassroots empowerment, … [but] also exhibit[s] a series of contradictory tendencies’ (Swyngedouw, 2005: 1992). Promises of empowerment are paralleled by ‘often undemocratic and authoritarian character[istics] … leading to a substantial democratic deficit’, he contends (Swyngedouw, 2005: 1993). The key focus of Swyngedouw’s argument is the idealised figure of the ‘stakeholder’ who is free and encouraged to participate in governance. Yet, citizens’ relationships to and influence on governance are less clear and much less codified than in the more formalised era of government. In the latter, the mechanisms for influencing those with decision-making power were relatively clear, at least for those conferred formal citizenship rights within a given polity. While this is not in any way an idealisation of the democratic benefits of liberal democracy, networked governance models of decision-making are less transparent and understandable.

Swyngedouw draws heavily on neo-Foucauldian theories of governmentality and technologies of government in his analysis. He is concerned with ‘democratic deficit’ under governance and the questions it raises about: (a) who is allowed and enabled to participate and who is excluded, and (b) ill-defined systems of representation, accountability and legitimacy and the state’s continued and increasingly ‘pivotal and often autocratic’ (Swyngedouw, 2005: 1999) role in organising and legitimating new governance networks. In this sense, his paper contains early inklings of his later pioneering work on post-political or post-democratic governance (e.g. Swyngedouw, 2009), as elaborated in this VSI by both Macleod and Deas.

For all the myriad ways in which governance operates beyond the formal structures of government, the importance of elections and other types of voting (in plebiscites, for example) must not be underestimated. Nonetheless, critical studies of voting have been relatively thin on the ground in the governance literature, despite clear evidence that the state is still centrally involved. This is problematic, given that voting is still the primary way that most people engage in the governance of urbanism. Furthermore, as the paper by Wouter Van Gent, Elmar Jansen and Joost Smits (2014) in this collection shows, the study of elections can shed valuable light on the sorts of question of urban-regional relations, socio-spatial splintering, and the politics of difference and identity that others have argued are crucial to understanding contemporary urbanism.

Their quantitative research explores the rise of Right-wing Radical Populist Parties (RRPPs) in the Netherlands and argues that there are social and spatial reasons for their rise, in numerous countries (something highlighted most recently by the politics of ‘Brexit’ in the UK). For Van Gent et al., supporters of RRPPs tend to be defensive and nostalgic members of the traditional middle class (as opposed to the new urban middle classes) who live outside traditional city cores but who, nonetheless, define their identities and electoral choices as much in relation to city centres as to their suburban surroundings. Specifically, these RRPP supporters tend to have relatively homogeneous social networks and, thus, political positions, and, in many cases, may have selectively migrated to the suburbs to escape immigrants and perceived problems in urban cores. Their votes, then, are ‘a defensive reaction coming from a fear for “suburbanisation of urban issues”’ (Van Gent et al., 2014: 1790). Through this study in electoral geography we are returned both to questions of splintered but interconnected urbanism (Brenner, 1999: MacLeod, 2011) and also to issues of difference, habitus and citizenship that also motivate authors such as Bell and Binnie (2004) and Swyngedouw (2005).

UGS 1.0, largely dealing with NUP, entrepreneurialism and urbanisation, and UGS 2.0, addressing a wider range of approaches to and implications of the governance of urbanism are, of course, overlapping and inter-related. They have been in conversation with each to some degree and they should remain so. Moreover, the Swyngedouw and Van Gent et al. contributions conceptually and empirically highlight the continued importance of the formal, traditional elements of government in the era of governance and, thus, emphasise the necessity to study how urbanism is governed from a range of approaches and methods. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of critical and judicious eclecticism in our approach to governance in particular and to urbanism more generally.

Extending urban governance studies spatially and temporally

The UGS 1.0/2.0 schema I have used so far has its limits, of course. At most, it indicates matters of degree, with certain authors emphasising urbanisation while others focus more attention on questions of identity, daily life, participation and citizenship. Nonetheless, the heuristic highlights the tendency to put more weight on one or other aspect of urban governance. It also suggests that theoretically informed empirical studies provide the most scope for analysing the interweaving of the social production of urban spaces and the spatial production of urban societies. The remaining papers in the VSI all emphasise that urban spaces, lives and governance practices are not merely local or of the present moment (even if they may manifest themselves locally and differently in the present). Each paper, to one extent or another, broadens the spatial and temporal scope of governance studies, moving beyond UGS 2.0, perhaps, and certainly extending into the microspaces of governance, back to the past and forward into the future.

Pauline McGuirk and Robyn Dowling (2011) analyse the microspaces and micropolitics of how middle class owner-residents (or consumer-citizens) govern private masterplanned housing estates. They convincingly critique most urban governance literature and especially that of the NUP variety for:

a lack of in-depth understanding of: first, the strategies and material practices that urban households and individuals adopt in their everyday lives to obtain the means of social reproduction; secondly, the subjectivities that are generated in relation to these strategies and practices; and, thirdly, an understanding of the urban politics that frame strategies, practices and subjectivities. (McGuirk and Dowling, 2011: 2612)

Their study of the aspirations, experiences and governance practices of residents (e.g. negotiating covenants, employing maintenance personnel, negotiating disputes, etc.) highlights the lived realities of the new world of privatism and downloaded governance responsibilities that Macleod, Brenner, and others point to in their papers, while also resonating with Şenol’s discussion of the micropolitics of neighbourhood.

Their interviews with residents in four different types of estates in Sydney lead them to argue for the importance of positioning the ‘fleshy, messy and indeterminate stuff of everyday life’ and social reproduction (Katz, 2001: 711, quoted in McGuirk and Dowling, 2011: 2612) at the heart of studies of urban governance (see also Jonas and Ward, 2007, for example). They also argue against the assumption that generalised neoliberal conditions necessarily entail the reproduction of perfect neoliberal subjects, even among middle class consumer-citizens who have benefited so much from Sydney’s recently booming housing market. Instead, they find ambivalence, tension and resistance among the discourses, logics and practices of privatism in the estates. Just as MacLeod invoked the metaphor of ‘splintering’ to characterise the urban-regional landscapes of privatist urban governance, McGuirk and Dowling speak of ‘fracturing’ consumer-citizenship to highlight the tensions within these privately governed enclaves – tensions that are, as Swyngedouw would note, still mediated at some level by the state through laws, for example.

This is a point Rob Fairbanks (2011) makes in his contribution. Like McGuirk and Dowling, Fairbanks examines the micro-scale governance of everyday life in reference to larger forces and contexts. Unlike them, Fairbanks analyses the everyday lives and struggles of some of the most marginalised, low-income urban residents. They are part of an informal ‘recovery house’ movement in Philadelphia that has grown up in the abandoned row house landscape of the city’s formerly working class neighbourhoods and in the governance gaps left by the fundamental restructuring of the US welfare state. His ethnography, part of a larger project (see Fairbanks, 2009) also shows how, ‘at the level of both the street and the self, … the restructuration of urban governance takes hold by way of collective and increasingly privatized consumption’ (Fairbanks, 2009: 2556). As in McGuirk and Dowling’s account, people’s attempts to govern their lives and homes are ridden with tensions. On the one hand, some attempts by service providers and participants in the recovery houses to govern recovery from substance dependence seem to take on many of the ideas of neoliberalism, while others seem to chart different directions and ideologies.

Fundamentally, Fairbanks’ ‘“other story” of the new urban politics’ (2011: 2556) shows how marginalised, street-level actors are agents in the reorganisation of how ‘unruly’ populations are governed in the ‘post-welfare city’. ‘The discourse of recovery, drawing on the self-steering capacities of impoverished subjects, becomes an able partner for the devolutionary welfare state’ (Fairbanks, 2011: 2566), he argues. In this context public–private partnerships operate in a different register – linking the vestigial formal welfare state and informal, extra-legal recovery house operators – to govern the behaviour of this particular population and its urban built environment (see also DeVerteuil, 2015).

McGuirk and Dowling and Fairbanks turn their perspectives to the intimate microscales of everyday life as sites and objects of governance. In doing so, they show how governance is produced not only from the ‘top down’, through the actions of the state and business elites, but also, and increasingly, from the ‘bottom up’, through the actions of variously ‘responsibilised’ groups of urban residents. Tim Bunnell’s (2015) contribution resonates with this approach by addressing recent work in policy mobilities (Cook, 2008; McCann, 2011; McCann and Ward, 2011; Peck and Theodore, 2015). This approach analyses how governance is produced through circuits of mobilised ideas, models and policy expertise. Bunnell emphasises the importance of how governance is a learned process developed in a context of ongoing interreferecing and comparison of policies and places that are seen as exemplars of best practice. Thus, his work resonates with a growing concern for how governance and urbanism, more generally, are learned (Cook and Ward, 2012; Cook et al., 2014; González, 2011; McFarlane, 2011; Temenos and McCann, 2012; Ward, 2011).

Bunnell, among others, shows that that there is more going on in the world of governance than the circulation and top down imposition of neoliberal models along and from a North Atlantic axis, as some studies of the NUP might lead one to believe. Moreover, he uses the concept of ‘antecedent cities’ to emphasise that studies of policy mobilities are able to avoid the trap of ‘presentism’. The circulation of models of how best to build and govern cities has a long history and a complex global geography in which: (a) how they play out depends on the contexts through which they flow; (b) cities often relegated to the lower levels of developmental hierarchies – e.g. Singapore, Cape Town, Johannesburg, Seoul, Phnom Penh and Hong Kong – are significant models for others; and (c) these models are not necessarily neoliberal. Governance is by no means a one-size-fits-all proposition, but the number and character of the sizes in which it comes is an empirical question, worthy of further exploration.

While Bunnell emphasises the past in his discussion of antecedent cities and the effects of references to them, the final two papers in this VSI, by Harriet Bulkeley and Kristine Kern (2006) and by Alberto Vanolo (2014), discuss attempts to govern the future. Of course, all governance and certainly planning is always about governing or shaping the future, but, nonetheless, these papers speak to two current modalities of governance: the growing spectre of climate change as an existential threat and the increasingly prevalent discourse of the ‘smart city’ and its vision of a particular techno-rational future for urban governance.

Bulkeley and Kern’s paper is a relatively early engagement with the role that local governments might play in addressing the causes and consequences of climate change. It argues that it will be increasingly critical in the future to enhance local governments’ capacities to govern climate change. Published at a time when UGS 1.0 was well fleshed-out and beginning to be nuanced, the paper is valuable for its comparison of governance regimes in the UK and Germany and also for its strong argument against an easy government/governance dualism, proposing instead ‘multiple modes [of governing] through which the local state has sought to govern for climate change protection’ (Bulkeley and Kern, 2238). Informed by Foucault’s and Allen’s work on power, the authors emphasise how governing is about the orchestration of goals and actions through four ‘modes’ – self-governance, governing by provision, governing by authority and governing through enabling. In turn, the authors argue that these modes of governing are facilitated by certain local government capacities, from sanction to persuasion (highlighting the ongoing role of state power in an era of networks and partnership), and are directed toward ‘key spheres of climate change action’ (Bulkeley and Kern, 2242), including energy, transportation, urban planning and waste management, the governance of which will have significant impacts on emissions of greenhouse gasses in the future.

Recently, these spheres have become some of the prime targets of those who advocate ‘smart city’ solutions to the problems of urban governance. In the final contribution, Alberto Vanolo (2014) unpacks what this term means with reference to its mobilisation from the USA, as a combination of ‘smart growth’, ‘green city’ and ‘informational city’ ideas, to Europe, specifically Italy (see Bunnell, 2015, on travelling models). ‘Smart City’ proponents envision a future where new and advanced technologies will assist in producing a ‘efficient, technologically advanced, green and socially inclusive city’ (Vanolo, 2014: 883), yet, for Vanolo, ‘smart city’ is largely an empty signifier, open to many interpretations and agendas, but one that tends, in the contemporary context, to distance ‘urban governance from politics [cf. MacLeod, Deas and Swyngedouw in this VSI] and represents the urban question in terms of the environment and technology, broadening the field of action of technicians, consultants and private companies’ at the expense of wider democratic engagement (Vanolo, 2014: 884). Urban ‘smartness’ then is not only about information technologies, but is also, Vanolo argues, a political technology that, following Foucault’s notion of governmentality, encourages individuals to behave in certain ways, creating a moral order of acceptability and unacceptability in identities and behaviours (cf. Bell and Binnie, 2004) with benefits and dangers for citizenship and urban life. He urges that the ‘smart city [be brought] into the political arena in order to spark a serious debate about the kind of smart city in which we want to live (Vanolo, 2014: 895).

Conclusion

This VSI traces how studies of urban governance have developed and changed since the 1990s in the pages of Urban Studies. In framing the collection of papers, I suggest that studying governance should and does involve attention not only to urbanisation and economic development (UGS 1.0) but to urbanism – relationships between built environments and the identities, practices, struggles and opportunities of everyday social life, as governed by the state, partnerships and relatively informal localised practices (UGS 2.0). Central to the urban governance literature in both of its iterations is a concern with questions of power and politics. Vanolo (2014) urges a thoughtful discussion on what type of smart city, is desirable. More generally, urban governance studies are concerned with unpacking the conditions, interests and strategies that frame the urbanism we currently live and the potential future urbanisms we might produce.

Put this way, the critical analysis of governance is of great importance as part of a wider urban (political) studies. It provides opportunities to diagnose existing conditions and point to potential alternatives. Yet, as urban governance itself will continue to develop, so should urban governance studies. This is not a call to forget or dismiss longstanding approaches, however. It would be extremely damaging to turn away from the explanatory power of Marxian political economy in the study of governance, for example. Yet, that approach is not the only one of value. How certain conceptual frameworks are combined and deployed, how methodological strategies are developed, and how new empirical foci are identified will be a matter of ongoing effort and discussion among scholars from a range of positions and geographical locations within the multidisciplinary field of urban studies.

It would seem, for example, that an ongoing attention to theorising the state must be central to analyses of urban governance. As is clear from a number of the papers in this VSI, the state has been and continues to be central to governance, even as governance is also beyond the state in many of its iterations and implications (see, for instance, Walker’s (2008) use of Jessop’s state theory as part of an analysis of Aboriginal self-determination in Canadian urban housing initiatives). Similarly, conceptualising governance must continue to involve (re)theorisations of territory, territoriality and territorialisation. The assumption that states and urban governance are tied to and contained within specific territories is patently false, yet territoriality and the territorialisation of governance, economic development and social life, is nonetheless fundamental to the production of urbanism. This is the case even in a world of strong interconnectivity, inter-referencing and relationality in, for example, the realm of policy mobilities. Thus, conceptualising territoriality in the context of urban governance necessitates a concomitant attention to relationality and to the dialectical relationship between the two (McCann and Ward, 2010).

These and other conceptual concerns necessitate an ongoing critical questioning of the methodology and methods of urban governance research. As we have seen in this VSI, most work on governance draws from document and content analysis and qualitative interviews. A much smaller amount employs ethnography. Some draws upon quantitative analyses. All of these are valid approaches when, as I argued above, they match the research objectives of the study in question. Yet, other methodological approaches, from quantitative and network analyses, to visual methods, to mapping, to community-based and participatory research strategies may also lend themselves to the study of governance, depending on the specific questions being asked.

The VSI has highlighted some of the ‘classics’ of urban governance studies as well as some more recent additions. As urbanism is a process, so is urban governance. Therefore, new empirical concerns continue to emerge, while those discussed above retain their salience. Clearly, the increasingly widespread housing crisis is an area ripe for critical analyses, as are questions of migration, refuge and asylum, of poverty and growing wealth gaps, and of urban and regional infrastructures. Moreover, as I have already suggested, the importance of formal politics, in the sense of elections, referenda, etc., and as conducted by elected politicians, particularly mayors who engage in what Pasotti (2010) calls ‘mayoral brand politics’ (see Jayne, 2012; McNeill, 2001) is worthy of continued attention. This, of course, is an impressionistic, partial list. The larger point is that the development of urban governance studies since the 1980s, as represented in this VSI, provides a strong basis for continued research into the practice of governing urbanism.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

References

Allen

(2004) The whereabouts of power: Politics, government and space. Geografiska Annaler, Series B 86(1): 19–32.

Bassett

(1996) Partnerships, business elites and urban politics: New forms of governance in an English city? Urban Studies 33(3): 539–555.

Bell

Binnie

(2004) Authenticating queer space: Citizenship, urbanism and governance. Urban Studies 41(9): 1807–1820.

Brenner

(1999) Globalisation as reterritorialisation: The re-scaling of urban governance in the European Union. Urban Studies 36(3): 431–451.

Brenner

Theodore

(eds) (2002) Spaces of Neoliberalism: Urban Restructuring in Western Europe and North America. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Bulkeley

Kern

(2006) Local government and the governing of climate change in Germany and the UK. Urban Studies 43(12): 2237–2259.

Bunnell

(2015) Antecedent cities and inter-referencing effects: Learning from and extending beyond critiques of neoliberalisation. Urban Studies 52(11): 1983–2000.

Clarke

Gaile

G L

(1989) Moving toward entrepreneurial economic development policies: Opportunities and barriers. Policy Studies Journal 17(3): 574–598.

Cook

(2008) Mobilising urban policies: The policy transfer of US Business Improvement Districts to England and Wales. Urban Studies 45(4): 773–795.

10.

Cook

Ward

(2012) Conferences, informational infrastructures and mobile policies: The process of getting Sweden ‘BID ready’. European Urban and Regional Studies 19(2): 137–152.

11.

Cook

Ward

(2014) A springtime journey to the Soviet Union: Postwar planning and policy mobilities through the Iron Curtain. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38(3): 805–822.

12.

Cook

Ward

(2015) Post-war planning and policy tourism: The international study tours of the Town and Country Planning Association 1947–1961. Planning Theory & Practice 16(2): 184–205.

13.

Deas

(2014) The search for territorial fixes in subnational governance: City-regions and the disputed emergence of post-political consensus in Manchester, England. Urban Studies 51(11): 2285–2314.

14.

Derickson

(2016) The racial state and resistance in Ferguson and beyond. Urban Studies 53(11): 2223–2237. VSI available at: http://usj.sagepub.com/site/Virtual_Collection/racial_state.xhtml.

15.

DeVerteuil

(2015) Resilience in the Post-Welfare Inner City. Cambridge, MA and Malden, MA: Polity Press.

16.

Fairbanks

(2009) How it Works: Recovering Citizens in Post-welfare Philadelphia. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

17.

Fairbanks

(2011) The politics of urban informality in Philadelphia’s Recovery House Movement. Urban Studies 48(12): 2555–2570.

18.

Foucault

(1980) Two lectures. In: Gordon

(ed.) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. New York: Pantheon Books, pp. 78–108.

19.

Foucault

(1994) Truth and juridical forms. In: Faubion

(ed.) Power: Michel Foucault, Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, Vol. 3. London: Penguin Books, pp. 1–89.

20.

González

(2011) Bilbao and Barcelona ‘in motion’. How urban regeneration ‘models’ travel and mutate in the global flows of policy tourism. Urban Studies 48(7): 1397–1418.

21.

Goodwin

(2009) Governance. In: Kitchen

Thrift

(eds) International Encyclopedia of Human Geography. London: Elsevier, pp. 593–599.

22.

Graham

Marvin

(2001) Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition. Oxford: Blackwell.

23.

Harvey

(1989) From managerialism to entrepreneurialism: The transformation in urban governance in late capitalism. Geografiska Annaler. Series B. Human Geography 71(1): 3–17.

24.

Hastings

(1996) Unravelling the process of ‘partnership’ in urban regeneration policy. Urban Studies 33(2): 253–268.

25.

Hornby

(1995) High Fidelity. New York: Riverhead.

26.

Jayne

(2012) Mayors and urban governance: Discursive power, identity and local politics. Social & Cultural Geography 13(1): 29–47.

27.

Jessop

(1997) Capitalism and its future: Remarks on regulation, government and governance. Review of International Political Economy 4(3): 561–581.

28.

Jessop

(1998) The rise of governance and the risks of failure: The case of economic development. International Social Science Journal 50(155): 29–45.

29.

Jonas

Ward

(2007) Introduction to a debate on city-regions: New geographies of governance, democracy and social reproduction. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 31(1): 169–178.

30.

Katz

(2001) Vagabond capitalism and the necessity of social reproduction. Antipode 33(4): 709–728.

31.

Kristensen Ole

(1983) Public versus private provision of governmental services: The case of Danish fire protection services. Urban Studies 20(1): 1–9.

32.

Leitner

(1990) Cities in pursuit of economic growth: The local state as entrepreneur. Political Geography Quarterly 9(2): 146–170.

33.

Lindell

(2008) The multiple sites of urban governance: insights from an African city. Urban Studies 45(9): 1879–1901.

34.

McCann

(2011) Urban policy mobilities and global circuits of knowledge: Toward a research agenda. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 101(1): 107–130.

35.

McCann

Ward

(2010) Relationality/territoriality: Toward a conceptualization of cities in the world. Geoforum 41(2): 175–184.

36.

McCann

Ward

(eds) (2011) Mobile Urbanism: Cities and Policymaking in the Global Age. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

37.

McFarlane

(2011) Learning the City: Knowledge and Translocal Assemblage. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

38.

McGuirk

Dowling

(2011) Governing social reproduction in masterplanned estates: Urban politics and everyday life in Sydney. Urban Studies 48(12): 2611–2628.

39.

MacLeod

(2011) Urban politics reconsidered growth machine to post-democratic city? Urban Studies 48(12): 2629–2660.

40.

McNeill

(2001) Embodying a Europe of the cities: Geographies of mayoral leadership. Area 33(4): 353–359.

41.

Martin

McCann

Purcell

(2003) Space, scale, governance, and representation: Contemporary geographical perspectives on urban politics and policy. Journal of Urban Affairs 25(2): 113–121.

42.

Painter

(2009) Governance. In: Gregory

Johnston

Pratt

. (eds) The Dictionary of Human Geography. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 312–313.

43.

Pasotti

(2010) Political Branding in Cities: The Decline of Machine Politics in Bogotá, Naples, and Chicago. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

44.

Peck

Theodore

(2015) Fast Policy. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

45.

Peterson

(1981) City Limits. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.

46.

Proudfoot

McCann

(2008) At street level: Bureaucratic practice in the management of urban neighborhood change. Urban Geography 29(4): 348–370.

47.

Raco

(2009) Governance, urban. In: Kitchen

Thrift

(eds) International Encyclopedia of Human Geography. London: Elsevier, pp. 622–627.

48.

Robinson

(2011) 2010 Urban geography plenary lecture – The travels of urban neoliberalism: Taking stock of the internationalization of urban theory. Urban Geography 32(8): 1087–1109.

49.

Rose

(1999) Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

50.

Roy

(2015) What is urban about critical urban theory? Urban Geography 37(6): 810–823.

51.

Şenol

(2013) Elected neighbourhood officers in a Turkish city (Izmir): Gendered local participation in governance. Urban Studies 50(5): 977–993.

52.

Simone

(2004) For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

53.

Swyngedouw

(1992) The Mammon quest. ‘Glocalisation’, interspatial competition and the monetary order: The construction of new scales. In: Dunford

Kafkalas

(eds) Cities and Regions in the New Europe: The Global–Local Interplay and Spatial Development Strategies. London: Belhaven Press, pp. 39–67.

54.

Swyngedouw

(2005) Governance innovation and the citizen: The Janus face of governance beyond-the-state. Urban Studies 42(11): 1991–2006.

55.

Swyngedouw

(2009) The antinomies of the postpolitical city: In search of a democratic politics of environmental production. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 33(3): 601–620.

56.

Temenos

McCann

(2012) The local politics of policy mobility: Learning, persuasion, and the production of a municipal sustainability fix. Environment and Planning A 44(6): 1389–1406.

57.

Van Gent

Jansen

Smits

(2014) Right-wing radical populism in city and suburbs: An electoral geography of the Partij Voor de Vrijheid in the Netherlands. Urban Studies 51(9): 1775–1794.

58.

Vanolo

(2014) Smartmentality: The smart city as disciplinary strategy. Urban Studies 51(5): 883–898.

59.

Walker

(2008) Aboriginal self-determination and social housing in urban Canada: A story of convergence and divergence. Urban Studies 45(1): 185–205.

60.

Ward

(2011) Entrepreneurial urbanism, policy tourism, and the making mobile of policies. In: Bridge

Watson

(eds) The New Blackwell Companion to the City. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 726–737.

61.

Wingo

(1973) The quality of life: Toward a microeconomic definition. Urban Studies 10(1): 3–18.

62.

(2002) China’s changing urban governance in the transition towards a more market-oriented economy. Urban Studies 39(7): 1071–1093.