Abstract
In recent years, theorizations of the city have increasingly focused on the capacity of urban places to stretch beyond the spatial limits of territory. In urban geography and urban studies, in particular, theoretical work now stresses the multitude of flows, connections, and mobilities that stretch contemporary cities beyond national or local scales. In work that deals with urban policy, attention is increasingly being paid to the ways in which urban policies and ideas travel and circulate between cities. Yet while this process has been given much scholarly attention, the actual pathways by which policies travel remain vague and largely understudied.
Within this context, McCann and Ward’s edited volume is a much needed look into the ways in which urban policies and ideas about the urban circulate globally. While primarily written for researchers, the volume is approachable and packed with insight for professional audiences. Designed as a series of theoretically informed yet empirically driven analyses, the book brings together leading scholars in Urban Geography and Urban Studies to deepen understandings of urban policy mobilities. This involves tracing out the flows and networks of policy ideas as they move from one location to another, while understanding that urban policy ideas are altered through travel and movement. According to the editors, the book has three primary goals, the first of which is to find a middle ground between “territorial” and “relational” understandings of contemporary urban processes by understanding the city as a constant mediation between local actions and global processes. But rather than just see urban policies as local modifications of global flows—as is too commonly and problematically assumed—McCann and Ward build on the idea of assemblage, borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari. Using the idea of assemblage enables the authors in the volume to resist either–or dichotomies in favor of muddier networks of contingency and flux. This suggests a processual understanding of urbanization in which urban assemblages are constantly reacting and constructing themselves, responding to global processes while reconfiguring those processes at the same time. Understanding the city in assemblage terms also broadens out the agents involved in urban policy making, moving toward an understanding of urban governance that includes the many sites in which policies circulate, both formally and informally. This rhizomatic understanding of policy mobility means that understanding urban decision making often requires stepping outside of the city itself.
The second goal of the volume is to deepen the literature on policy transfer found primarily in Political Science. McCann and Ward argue that despite the positive work done by this literature, it is limited by its focus on formal institutions and global elites rather than more bottom–up political mobilizations. Furthermore, the authors contend that policy transfer literature concentrates exclusively on national territories, ignoring the complicated extraterritorial or interurban linkages between cities. Finally, McCann and Ward suggest that work on urban policy mobilities needs to focus more on the ways in which policies are altered when they travel. For Robinson, in her surprisingly optimistic chapter, this leaves open the possibility that cities of the global south are capable of influencing the shape of their cities rather than just responding to dictates from western urban planners and developers.
The third goal is to assess the methodological difficulties and potentialities of this type of comparative urban research. Understanding the contemporary city increasingly requires tracing out the networks and circulatory systems that sustain and create the cities we inhabit. But this type of comparative work poses both methodological as well as ethical problems. The chapters in this volume suggest ways of undertaking theoretically informed research into contemporary urban policy mobilities, but this is an arguably nascent field.
Given these three goals, the chapters in the volume are subsequently diverse in nature. In the first chapter, “A Counterhegemonic Relationality of Place,” Massey continues her work on place by arguing that there is no distinction between a “territorial” and a “relational” understanding of urban sites, an argument that relies on Massey’s understanding of places as momentary spatializations of broader networks and processes. For Massey, all places are constituted by their relations with other places, which suggests both the importance of global flows and connections but also the importance of local territories and sites. Massey pursues this understanding of “place beyond place” (p. 3) through an inquiry into a relationship between London and Caracas that traded urban expertise for oil at a reduced price. For Massey, despite the limited effects of this policy due to its being cut short in two years, programs like the London–Caracas agreement demonstrate the possibility of “counterhegemonic” understandings of place that have the potential to reorient the political economy of policy making. In the second chapter, “The Spaces of Circulating Knowledge: City Strategies and Global Urban Governmentality,” Robinson echoes some of this global potentiality through her continued call for a postcolonial urban studies. Building on ideas of governmentality, Robinson sees city strategies as a potential site in which poor cities can counteract dominant planning ideas and work to construct potentially more effective policy solutions.
In contrast, Jamie Peck’s chapter, “Creative Moments: Working Culture, through Municipal Socialism and Neoliberal Urbanism,” compares a series of initiatives developed by municipal socialists in the United Kingdom in the early 1980s with the current global policy ecology of neoliberal, market-centric approaches. For Peck, what distinguishes the contemporary policy context from the early 1980s is the degree to which neoliberal policy ideas are increasingly hegemonic. Peck’s piece is an important challenge to the contemporary dominance of “creative class” strategies, despite his suggestions of the near inevitability of continued neoliberalization. In the case of Detroit—whose urban future evidently now rests on a set of “creative” policy strategies including windfarming or theater—one can very easily glimpse the limitations of now seemingly hegemonic policy proscriptions designed to attract creative urban residents. This is an important reminder for all those involved in mobile circuits of policy, whether as planners, critics, or urban residents. Ward’s chapter, titled “Policies in Motion and in Place: The Case of Business Improvement Districts,” is focused on the development and travel of business improvement districts (BIDs) and makes some similar points. Ward suggests that the fast transfer of BIDs is a demonstration of a contemporary policy ecology that differs from earlier eras through the development of networks of transnational policy professionals and the increasing importance of urban comparisons. The movement of BIDs is an ideal case study for analyzing the networks of fast policy transfer that characterize contemporary urban policy making, and Ward finds that this movement demonstrates the path-dependency of neoliberal policy formulations that raise important questions about “citizenship, democracy, and the future of public space in the city” (p. 89).
The fifth chapter in the book, Eugene McCann’s “Points of Reference: Knowledge of Elsewhere in the Politics of Urban Drug Policy,” focuses on the development of drug prevention strategies in Vancouver, and McCann details the ways in which other locations are enrolled in local policy decisions and conversations. Of interest to McCann are the ways in which policy ideas from “elsewheres” are brought into urban conversations and subsequently remain, both as frames for future discussions as well as imagined sites in their own right. McCann’s chapter—like much of this edited volume—suggests that categories of local and global are increasingly intertwined and increasingly hard to maintain. In these sorts of relational interactions, one glimpses the ways in which categories of global and local are coconstitutive rather than preordained. Understanding the city as an assemblage suggests that these categories and binary distinctions—local/global, territorial/relational—are themselves constructed through the movements of policy ideas and research. Beginning to destabilize these categories enables a fuller understanding of the current shape of urban development to emerge. This is arguably the most important idea in this book, and suggests a partial sea change in how we—as scholars, urban residents, and policy professionals—are conceptualizing the contemporary city.
Yet, as the chapters in this book make clear, territory still matters. In their analysis of the movement of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) through the networks of global urbanization, Keil and Ali construct a “political pathology” of contemporary disease. Their chapter, the sixth in the volume and titled “The Urban Political Pathology of Emerging Infectious Disease in the Age of the Global City,” details the ways in which an increasingly connected world of people, microbes, and pathogens demands new strategies for containment. Suggesting that the contemporary networked city is now itself a vector for disease, Keil and Ali highlight the ways in which new systems of governance are being constructed in the spaces between territory and fixity in our increasingly networked world. The penultimate contribution in the book, McNeill’s “Airports, Territoriality, and Urban Governance,” details the complicated relationships between urban governments and airports, suggesting the myriad ways in which neoliberalizing processes are both hegemonic while also muddled and in-the-making. The tensions between centralization and decentralization are made abundantly clear in McNeill’s analysis of the airport, itself the clearest demonstration of the decentralizing and globalizing tendencies of the contemporary world.
Throughout, this volume—which functions as a crystallization of much recent scholarship looking at urban mobilities—suggests new formulations of the city that reject binary categorizations in favor of fluid understandings of the multitude of processes that are currently constructing and dismantling urban regions. Finding ways to trace the networks of policy conversations is an increasingly important project for researchers interested in understanding contemporary urbanization. For those invested in shaping urban policy—as planners, developers, or educators—this book is a timely reminder of the increasingly intricate networks of policy that continue to shape our world. Through assembling a volume that draws from contemporary urban scholarship while also contributing their own analyses, Ward and McCann have demonstrated the ways in which understandings of mobile policies suggest exciting terrain for future urban research.