Policies on the Move: The Transatlantic Travels of Tax Increment Financing

Abstract

Growing influence of the "new mobilities paradigm" among human geographers has combined with a long and rich disciplinary tradition of studying the movement of things and people. Yet how policy ideas and knowledge are mobilized remains a notably under-developed area of inquiry.In this paper, we discuss the mobilization of policy ideas and policy models as a particularly powerful type of mobile knowledge. The paper examines the burgeoning academic work on policy mobilities and points towards a growing policy mobilities approach in the literature, noting the multidisciplinary conversations behind the approach as well as the key commitments of many of its advocates. This approach is illustrated using the travels of Tax Increment Financing (TIF) with the role of learning and market-making within efforts to spread TIF to more cities highlighted. In conclusion, we discuss some of the political and practical limits that often confront efforts to mobilize policy ideas.3

Evental Infrastructure: Momentous Geographies of Technoscience Production

“…These lessons offer new theoretical insights into the ontological being of infrastructure, which exists not straightforwardly as stable technoscience scaffolds for modernity's spatial orders (Monstadt 2009;Otter 2017) but as a series of presented multiplicities (Badiou 2013) stuttering and morphing through all manners of irruptive events. To be sure, recent work has begun acknowledging the socially "lively" nature of infrastructure (McCann 2011;Amin 2014;Wood 2014;Baker et al 2016), but I contend that current approaches have not gone far enough to capture the provocative potentialities of reframings, ruptures, and jolts to the status quo (Cloke and Dickinson 2019) that events are capable of enacting on, and through, infrastructure. This article's explications of the (un)becomings of the SCS airspace are intended to give a taste of these latent forces driving air transport geographies, extricating airspace infrastructure from its linear associations with rationality, reason, and cause and reconciling it with a more inexact flurry of life's excessive overflows ( Zi zek 2014).…”

“…It is in acknowledging this tension between stasis and unraveling that Zi zek (2014) also defined an event as "the effect that seems to exceed its causes" (5), where, out of many exigencies, events provide a radical pathway for interruption and ontological reframing (see also Badiou 2013). Affirming this endless process of slippage, this article offers a theoretical recounting of infrastructure that emphasizes its evental tendencya tendency that exists not merely at the point of inception, transplantation, or disruption (Graham 2010;McCann 2011;Baker et al 2016) but that is responsive to everyday circumstances that infrastructure's authors must battle to rein in continually.…”

Urban Redevelopment Policies on the Move: Rethinking the Geographies of Comparison, Exchange and Learning

“…On the other hand, urban policy mobility studies junk the positivist/rationalist-formalist work on policy transfer, replacing it with a postpositivist/rationalist-constructive approach (Peck, 2011;McCann and Ward, 2012;. It argues that the former rests on rather narrow typologies, is insufficiently sensitive to the socially produced nature of geographical scale and underplays the extent to which policies are constituted through movement (McCann, 2011;McCann and Ward, 2011;Baker et al, 2016).…”

Circulating planning ideas from the metropole to the colonies: understanding South Africa's segregated cities through policy mobilities

“…Concepts of 'policy mobilities' (McCann, 2011;McCann & Ward, 2011) can be useful in explaining the extensive efforts to segregate South African cities in the era of British imperialism. Within geography, research into the movement of policy across jurisdictional boundaries has ballooned in recent years, with a host of impressive studies of city planning (Robinson, 2011a), environmentalism (Temenos & McCann, 2012), public engagement (Peck & Theodore, 2015), transport (Wood, 2015a;Bok, 2014) and urban management (Baker et al, 2016). The scholarship identifies the mobility of policy knowledge and models (Freeman, 2012;Peck & Theodore, 2010) via policy actors (Wood, 2014;Prince, 2012;Larner & Laurie, 2010) and their policy organizations (Theodore & Peck, 2011;Saunier, 2001) as well as across sites of learning (Wood, 2015a;McCann & Ward, 2012;Clarke, 2010), interpreting policy as moving both topographically (i.e., via policy actors and their physical travels) and topologically (i.e., through benchmarking, rankings and other comparative urbanism tools).…”