Allan Cochrane

Researching the Geographies of Policy Mobility: Confronting the Methodological Challenges

Thinking in terms of policy mobilities is a profoundly geographical enterprise. It requires careful attention to the multiple and overlapping spaces of policy making, some of which are considered in the papers that follow and have also been the focus of an increasingly rich vein of research However, the implications of taking such an approach for the ways in which geography is understood are also profound, since they make it necessary to rethink or revisit how to conceptualize some of the taken-for-granted tools and heuristics that are often mobilized in geographical thinking including scale, territory, place, locality, and even the global. It is on some of the ways in which this needs to be done and the ways in which policy mobilities might be researched that this paper is focused.

Illusions of power: interviewing local elites

It has always been difficult to explore local power structures, and local politics (or local political economies) have often been reinterpreted in ways in which they are simply seen as the working out of wider national or global processes. The recognition that this is not enough has encouraged a growth in more locally focused research, frequently involving extensive interviewing of members of local business and political elites. Two key sets of questions arise from this sort of research. The first concerns the relationships between researcher and researched which are constructed by the research process itself. Is it possible to maintain an attitude of critical engagement? How is the research agenda constructed through negotiation between the participants? Who has power within the research process? The second involves a more serious issue for this form of research: namely, is it really possible to identify and explore power through interviews, however carefully constructed they are? What about the dimensions of power that are inaccessible to interviewers? This question has bedevilled community-power and pluralist research in the USA and the United Kingdom, and has never been adequately resolved. Do we now have the means to resolve it? The author explores both of these sets of questions with the help of evidence from a range of research projects in which he has been actively involved. The conclusion suggests productive approaches to the researching of local elites, identifying opportunities as well as constraints.

Living multiculture: understanding the new spatial and social relations of ethnicity and multiculture in England

Since 2001, as the social and spatial compositions of multiculture and migration have become more complicated and diverse, geography has moved back to the centre of policy, political, and academic arguments about cultural difference and ethnic diversity in England. This spatial turn is most obvious in preoccupations with notions of increasing ethnic segregation, but it is also apparent in discussions of the possibility of everyday multicultural exchanges in relationally understood places. Responding to the work of others on these questions and in these places, and informed by data from research exploring Ghanaian and Somali migrant settlement in Milton Keynes, we review some of the quantitative and qualitative evidence being drawn on in academic, policy, and political debates about contemporary multiculture. We problematise the dominance of the concept of segregation in these debates and examine the value of the concept of conviviality for understanding the ways in which multiculture is lived.

Reimagining Berlin: World City, National Capital or Ordinary Place?

Globalization has had a dramatic effect on the way in which we understand the operation of urban systems. Cities - or their elites - have increasingly sought to redefine and reimagine themselves through place marketing in ways which allow them to compete in the global marketplace. The ‘exceptional’ case of Berlin is explored in the context of regional and global restructuring. Berlin has been at the centre of dramatic changes over the last decade and has been forced to reimagine itself in quite a different set of global understandings. A series of different - competing and sometimes complementary - imaginary Berlins are being constructed in the process of reinsertion into ‘normal’ capitalist urbanization. The relationships between property-led visions with Berlin at the heart of a wider Europe, visions of Berlin as a revived capital of a united Germany and the redefinition of Berlin as an ordinary place are considered. Each of these visions offers a different interpretation of Berlin. The paper critically assesses the extent to which it is possible to escape from pro-growth agendas in developing an urban future for the city and explores some of the implications of Berlin’s current development trajectory.

Making up a Region: The Rise and Fall of the ‘South East of England’ as a Political Territory

Despite a growing academic scepticism about the significance of territory as a driver of politics, it remains a stubborn presence in the practice of politics. In the context of the wider UK devolution agenda the first decade of this century saw the emergence of an English regionalist project, based around a series of regional institutions and governance networks. In other words, it appeared that a new framework for subnational territorial politics was being constructed. With the help of a case study of the South East of England, I explore the fragility of the project in practice but also note the continuing importance of territory as a focus of politics, highlighting the importance of recognising that territory is not to be taken as something given, somehow preexisting and waiting to be filled with politics, but rather as something that is actively formed and shaped through the political process.

The Urban Unbound: London's Politics and the 2012 Olympic Games

Global events such as Londons 2012 Olympic Games raise questions about the ways in which embedded political arrangements take their shape from relationships that stretch across and beyond urban boundaries. In this article, the urban politics that we wish to capture is not one that is merely located in the city, but rather one that has to constantly take into account the mediated demands folded (as it were) into the urban arena. In the first part of the article, the corporate politics of an Olympic-related urban regeneration are outlined and then considered, first as a staged setting for interaction, a kind of placeless political engagement, and then as a more embedded spatial politics that takes into account the leverage of networked groups acting within and beyond the city. Following that, we explore the politics of regeneration when campaign groups and alternative coalitions of interest raise their own political demands by drawing on references outside of their immediate urban area and attempt to steer political dialogue in ways that extend the reach of urban politics. The urban politics at stake in this context, we argue, appears to work more through topology than a series of mapped connections; through actors registering their presence in ways that often dissolve the tension between inside and outside rather than define it in terms of separate political spaces.

Urban multiculture and everyday encounters in semi‐public, franchised cafe spaces

This paper engages with an emergent literature on multiculture and concepts such as conviviality and negotiation to explore how increasingly ethnically diverse population routinely share and mix in urban places and social spaces. As part of a wider ESRC funded, two-year qualitative study of changing social life and everyday multiculture in different geographical areas of contemporary England, this paper draws on participant observation data from three branches of franchised leisure and consumption cafe spaces. We pay particular attention to the ways these spaces work as settings of encounter and shared presence between groups often envisaged as separated by ethnic difference. Our findings suggest that corporate spaces which are more often dismissed as commercial, globalized spaces of soulless homogeneity can be locally inflected spaces whose cultural blandness may generate confident familiarity, ethnic mixity, mundane co-presence and inattentive forms of conviviality.

Making Up Meanings in a Capital City Power, Memory and Monuments in Berlin

Much contemporary writing on cities focuses on their position within wider global networks, so there is a risk of underplaying the significance of other aspects of the urban experience.This paper explores the particular role of Berlin as capital city in the making of the (new) Berliner Republic and the ways in which it is defined (and defines itself) within that Republic. Berlin is the (and often literally the building) site on which a new Germany is being constructed. The making up of the new Berlin is dominated by attempts to reinterpret and reimagine its history: it is a city of memorials and of deliberate absences; of remembering and forgetting, or trying to forget; of reshaping the past as well as trying to build a new future. The juxtapositions of urban experience, the layering of memories and the attempt to imagine a different future come together to define Berlin as a contemporary capital city.

Putting higher education in its place: the socio-political geographies of English universities

Traditionally, universities have been understood in terms that assume their special status within the social world – somehow divorced from the places within which they find themselves. Yet they are also increasingly expected to make some contribution to regional development. With the help of evidence drawn from an Economic and Social Research Council project, this article sets out to explore some of the implications of recognising the importance of the changing policy geographies of higher education. It highlights the extent to which and considers the ways in which universities are embedded within their regions and localities, while also being connected to a wider set of relationships.

Where is urban politics

We outline the rationale for reopening the issue of the spatiality of the ‘urban’ in urban politics. There is a long tradition of arguing about the distinctive political qualities of urban sites, practices and processes. Recent work often relies on spatial concepts or metaphors that anchor various political phenomena to cities while simultaneously putting the specificity of the urban itself in question. This symposium seeks to extend debates about the relationship between the urban and the political. Instead of asking ‘what is urban politics?’, seeking a definition of the urban as a starting point we begin by asking ‘where is urban politics?’. This question orients all of the contributions to this symposium, and it allows each to trace diverse political dimensions of urban life and living beyond the confines of ‘the city’ as classically conceived. The symposium engages with ‘the urban question’ through diverse settings and objects, including infrastructures, in-between spaces, professional cultures, transnational and postcolonial spaces and spaces of sovereignty. Contributions draw on a range of intellectual perspectives, including geography, urban studies, political science and political theory, anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, planning and environmental studies — indicating the range of intellectual traditions that can and do inform the investigation of the urban/political nexus.