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

Abstract

Recent years have seen the emergence of two interrelated strands of work in the field of English‐speaking urban studies. The first has centred on rethinking notions of place along relational lines. The second centres on rethinking what an attention to the city in the world might mean for understanding the arriving at and making up of urban policy. Taking its cue from the intersection of these two strands, this article explores the forging of Edinburgh's tax increment financing (TIF) policy. It highlights how those in the city drew upon experiences from elsewhere (both relatively close to home and further afield) in assembling the policy and the particular ‘local’ politics over its translation/adoption/failed introduction. The article argues for an approach to urban policy mobility studies which is sensitive both to the ephemeral, indeterminate and open‐ended ways in which policies are arrived at and made up, and the segmented and structured contexts that inform how policies appear and reappear in multiple locations.

Mobilizing a fast policy fix: Exploring the translation of 10-year plans to end homelessness in Alberta, Canada

“…Understanding 10-year plans as fast policy: The translation approach Policy mobilities scholarship draws attention to global circuits of policy knowledge and their role in the governance of cities worldwide (McCann, 2011a;McCann and Ward, 2011;Temenos and McCann, 2013;Ward, 2018). The term "mobilities" marks an effort to conceptualize the movement of a policy as more than an inter-jurisdictional transfer of knowledge based on the perceived superiority or suitability of the policy itself (Peck and Theodore, 2015).…”

The urban politics of policy failure

“…The argument for a temporal turn is also an argument for a relational one (Massey, 2005). The relational turn in urban geography is not new, yet the renewed interest in this epistemological thread brings new actors into debates and analyses of urban policy failure, not only focusing on policy makers (McCann & Ward, 2011;Ward, 2018), but also activists (Temenos, 2017;Lauermann & Vogelpohl, 2019), everyday actors (Baker et al, 2020;Jacobs & Lees, 2013), and planners and consultants (Colven, 2020;Larner & Laurie, 2010;Rapoport, 2015;Vogelpohl, 2018). Expanding the scope of study to encompass new relationships can broaden and enrich the spatial analysis of urban geographies of policy, taking into account different power structures that make up local contexts and expanding the scope of possibility for urban politics.…”

Intra-urban connectedness, policy mobilities and creative city-making: national conservatism vs. urban (neo)liberalism

“…The policy mobilities literature demonstrates that policy is increasingly internationally mobile and 'fast' (Peck and Theodore, 2015), but also subject to contestation, adaptation, purification and mutation as it travels and 'touches down' in different contexts (Hirt et al, 2013;McCann, 2008McCann, , 2011McCann and Ward, 2011). Furthermore, a focus on the dialectic between territoriality and extra-local relations and their mutual constitution emphasizes its relational nature (Andersson, 2014;McCann, 2011;Ward, 2018aWard, , 2018b. Policy is, thus, re-and co-constructed as it travels between internationally networked actors and through the learning and initiative of policymakers as a social practice (Cook, 2018;McCann, 2011;McCann and Ward, 2011).…”

“…Thus, it is timely to attend more closely to the role of place and context in understanding policy mobilities (Andersson, 2014; Dzudzek and Lindner, 2015; Nkula-Wenz, 2019; Ortegel, 2017; Temenos and McCann, 2012; Ward, 2018a, 2018b). Places have to be institutionally prepared for policy to ‘land’ there (Temenos and McCann, 2012) and policies from ‘outside’ cannot be adopted in a place unless it is open to them and ideologically and institutionally ready (Temenos and McCann, 2012; cf.…”