Elisabeth Peyroux

Business Improvement Districts (BIDs): the internationalization and contextualization of a ‘travelling concept’

In many countries across the world, Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) are seen as a new model of sub-municipal governance to secure private capital for improving the attractiveness of a city’s central spaces. Originating from North America (Canada and the United States), this model of self-taxing districts, often based on public–private partnerships, has spread to other continents, including Europe, Australia and Africa. This theme issue explores the internationalization and the contextualization of the BID model in both Northern countries (the United States, Canada, Germany and Sweden) and Southern countries (South Africa). The collection of articles focuses on key debates surrounding BIDs and presents different theoretical perspectives as well as lines of argument in relation to these debates. Relying on approaches based on political economy and local governance regimes, Foucault-inspired sociology of governance and governmentality studies or critical discourse analysis, the authors discuss the nature and significance of BIDs in relation to state restructuring and the neoliberalization of urban policies and to emergent rationalities and practices of security governance and policing arrangements. Using the recent discussions of policy transfer and ‘urban policy mobilities’, they look at the international circulation of the BID model and its local embeddedness, exploring the role of the global circuits of knowledge and the ways in which the model has been adopted and reshaped in different cities. Drawing a complex and differentiated picture of BIDs across continents and cities, this collection of articles emphasizes both the need for more comparative research across diverse urban experiences and contexts and the relevance of a relational perspective in urban studies that blurs the traditional lines of separation between studies of Northern and Southern cities.

Legitimating Business Improvement Districts in Johannesburg: a discursive perspective on urban regeneration and policy transfer

This article considers the transfer of the Business Improvement District model to South Africa from a discursive perspective. It examines the ways in which the private sector (property and business owners) has justified the adoption of the model and how it has moulded the concept to Johannesburg’s inner city. Drawing on critical discourse analysis, this article focuses on legitimation strategies, locating them within broader social practices and power relations within the framework of urban revitalization policies implemented after the democratic transition. By focusing on legitimation strategies, and more particularly on their linguistic and semiotic aspects at the micro level, the article shows how the analysis of language use, particularly through a socio-cognitive approach (Van Dijk, 2009), can contribute to uncovering the opinions, attitudes, ideologies, norms and values of social actors. It can also offer insights into a local reinterpretation of a globally circulating model. The comparative analysis of two case studies highlights changing assumptions and attitudes, at least in local rhetoric, and demonstrates how the imported model has been reshaped not only by different discourses associated with various social practices but also by changing policy demands. By considering discourse as an instrument of the social construction of reality as well as an instrument of power and control, the chosen approach also underlines the way in which inequalities are reproduced and maintained in Johannesburg.