Urban geographies I

Abstract

This review essay revisits recent scholarship within urban geography that has been shaped by relational theory, looking specifically at the scholarship on urban policy mobilities and urban assemblages. As will be shown, current urban geographies of relationality operate with irreconcilable grammars.

Learning Networks Among Swedish Municipalities: Is Sweden a Small World?

“…Literature on urban policy mobilities (Jacobs, 2012;McCann, 2011) and policy diffusion (Krause, 2011;Lee & van de Meene, 2012) has begun to explore the mechanisms of policy transfer and diffusion between cities. Our research shares this interest in policy mobility and diffusion but approaches the issue from a different angle.…”

Sustainable urbanism in the age of Photoshop: images, experiences and the role of learning through inhabiting the international travels of a planning model

“…The brief moments of inhabiting, by contrast, more accurately characterize the transitory experiences that typify the fast-paced world of planning consultancy. Examining how ideas move through inhabiting is an important counterbalance to what some have argued is an overemphasis in the policy mobilities literature on neoliberalization as a force driving the travels of policies (Bunnell 2013;Jacobs 2012). Unpacking the underlying ideologies of mobile ideas is certainly important.…”

Agglomeration and assemblage: Deterritorialising urban theory

“…While Deleuze and Guattari made no claim to the status of theory, it has been developed as theory by DeLanda (2006DeLanda ( , 2016 among others and applied in a burgeoning variety of ways in urban studies (Dovey, 2016;McFarlane, 2011;McGuirk et al, 2016;Müller, 2015;Rankin, 2011;Sendra, 2015;Simone, 2011;Wood, 2009). It has been variously identified with 'relational' (Jacobs, 2012), 'material' (Rydin, 2014) and 'non-representational' (Anderson and Harrison, 2010) turns in social theory. It has a 'flat ontology' that opposes the reduction of the particular to the general, of smaller to larger scales.…”