Beyond the success/failure of travelling urban models: Exploring the politics of time and performance in Cape Town’s East City

Abstract

In this paper, we highlight the importance for policy mobility research to engage with the ‘multiple temporalities’ of globally prevalent urban policy ideas to understand how these eventually come to shape localities incrementally, and as we show, in sometimes unexpected manners. Through the study of over 10 years of (failed) redevelopment policies in Cape Town’s East City, we formulate two distinct contributions to existing urban policy mobility research. Firstly, we show that looking at the micro-politics of policy mobility in particular places, and over time, can help elucidate how conflicts and resistance to globally mobile urban models shape which aspects of a policy solutions are rendered mobile or immobile, present or absent and, finally, what ends up being implemented in the local context through specific projects. Secondly, we expand on new materialist approaches to urban policy mobility, bringing insights from performativity theory, to look at how ideas and models come to be ‘enacted’ in the real world through various and, perhaps more importantly, uncoordinated means. Our case study shows that policy mobility research should attend to disparate, uncoordinated, more-than-human activities, and how these end up shaping places even in the absence of purposive planning. That way, we show how changing and complex configurations of more than human networks, objects, money, buildings, etc. support the concrete performance of abstract and mobile urban models – in place and over time.

Spatial Theory in Planning Practice? On the Concepts of Space that Made Urban Design a Planning Solution for Segregation in Malmö, Sweden

“…For instance, Richard Florida‐isms were generously used to argue for post‐industrial cultural heritage preservation in Sorgenfri (Tran and Rydin 2019), which quite clearly echo McCann and Ward's (2012:46) descriptions of how Florida's commonsensical musings have elevated him to the “most renowned contemporary example” of a “policy actor” globally disseminating a policy package. Indeed, geographical scholarship on policy mobility has increasingly come to emphasise the “complex processes through which fragments of globally mobile urban policies are enacted” by a range of means far more “varied” than the circulation of specific policy practices (Robin and Nkula‐Wenz 2021:1268). This makes parts of the conceptual toolbox developed within policy mobility scholarship useful for approaching how also conceptual debates were reworked as policy, in particular those which highlight the active work of “translating” ideas and practices between contexts (Jones et al.…”

The afterlives of urban megaprojects: Grounding policy models and recirculating knowledge through domestic networks

“…This requires a longer timeframe than the immediate politics surrounding policy implementation or otherwise. Recent scholarship has engaged critically with the temporal aspect of policy making by unsettling outright analyses of policy ‘failure’ and demonstrating the generative effects, incremental dynamics and ‘absent presences’ of policies that though may fail to materialise in the first instance, can steer policy debate and learning to open-ended pathways (Baker and McCann, 2020; Chang, 2017; Robin and Nkula-Wenz, 2020; Ward, 2018). By engaging with longitudinal analyses of mobilised policies on the ground regardless of their initial outcome, it is possible to follow how it mutates, is reformatted or resignified over-time with an effect over future policies.…”

Resolving impasses in policy translation: Shall we adjust the idea or the process?

“…Despite the growing number of studies into 'failed' policy transfers (such as Wood, 2020) and studies that go beyond the dichotomy of failure/success (e.g. Robin and Nkula-Wenz, 2021), the majority of studies still explains successful transfers or investigates the potential for transferring a certain approach from A to B. This study aims to contribute to the growing literature on ineffective policy transfer.…”