Eugene McCann

Urban Policy Mobilities and Global Circuits of Knowledge: Toward a Research Agenda

This article proposes an agenda for research into the spatial, social, and relational character of globally circulating urban policies, policy models, and policy knowledge. It draws on geographical political economy literatures that analyze particular social processes in terms of wider sociospatial contexts, in part by maintaining a focus on the dialectics of fixity and flow. The article combines this perspective with poststructuralist arguments about the analytical benefits of close studies of the embodied practices, representations, and expertise through which policy knowledge is mobilized. I suggest that the notion of mobilities offers a useful rubric under which to operationalize this approach to the “local globalness” of urban policy transfer. The utility of this research approach is illustrated by the example of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, a city that is frequently referenced by policymakers elsewhere as they look for “hot” policy ideas. The case also indicates that there is much research yet to be done on the character and implications of interurban policy transfer. Specifically, I argue that, while maintaining a focus on wider forces, studies of urban policy mobilities must take seriously the role that apparently banal activities of individual policy transfer agents play in the travels of policy models and must also engage in fine-grained qualitative studies of how policies are carried from place to place, learned in specific settings, and changed as they move. The final section offers theoretical and methodological questions and considerations that can frame future research into how, why, and with what consequences urban policies are mobilized globally.

Expertise, Truth, and Urban Policy Mobilities: Global Circuits of Knowledge in the Development of Vancouver, Canada's ‘four Pillar’ Drug Strategy

There is growing attention across the social sciences to the mobility of people, products, and knowledge. This entails attempts to extend and/or rework existing understandings of global interconnections and is reflected in ongoing work on policy transfer—the process by which policy models are learned from one setting and deployed in others. This paper uses a case study of the development of an innovative approach to drug policy in Vancouver, British Columbia to deepen our understanding of what I call ‘urban policy mobilities.’ It details the often apparently mundane practices through which Vancouvers ‘four-pillar’ drug strategy—which combines prevention, treatment, enforcement, and harm reduction—was learned from cities outside North America and is now increasingly taught elsewhere. In doing so it draws on a neo-Foucauldian governmentality approach to emphasize the role of expertise (specialized knowledge held by many actors, not just credentialed professionals) and the deployment of certain powerful truths in the development of the policy. The paper concludes by discussing the spatialities of urban policy mobilities and raising questions about the political and conceptual importance of also maintaining a focus on the causes and consequences of policy immobilities.

Assembling urbanism: following policies and ‘studying through’ the sites and situations of policy making

Recent years have seen a challenge to the territorial orthodoxy in urban studies. An interest in policy assemblage, mobility, and mutation has begun to open up ‘the what’ and ‘the where’ of urban policy making. Unfortunately—but perhaps not surprisingly—theoretical developments and empirical insights have run ahead of significant methodological considerations. This paper turns to some of the methodological consequences of studying the chains, circuits, networks, and webs in and through which policy and its associated discourses and ideologies are made mobile and mutable. It focuses on three rubrics under which methodological decisions can be made: ‘studying through’ (rather than studying up or down), techniques of following actors, policies, etc, and relational situations in which mobilization and assemblage happen. The paper concludes with a brief reflection on how academic research design and writing assemble cities and urban policy making in ways that parallel the assembling practices of policy actors.

Policy Assemblages, Mobilities and Mutations: Toward a Multidisciplinary Conversation

This is a short response to Benson and Jordans 2011 article, ‘What Have We Learned from Policy Transfer Research?’ Its point of departure is their claim that ‘policy transfer is a useful concept that transfers easily across different sub-disciplines and analytical contexts’. In reviewing a growing heterogeneous body of work on policy assemblages, mobilities and mutations, we argue that policy transfer research has already travelled well beyond political science, that it has been critiqued and modified along the way, and that its future is an interdisciplinary one; a future in which we invite political scientists to join.

Policy Boosterism, Policy Mobilities, and the Extrospective City

Abstract This study develops the notion of “policy boosterism,” a subset of traditional branding and marketing activities that involves the active promotion of locally developed and/or locally successful policies, programs, or practices across wider geographical fields as well as to broader communities of interested peers. It is argued that policy boosterism is (1) an important element of how urban policy actors engage with global communities of professional peers and with local residents, and (2) a useful concept with which to interrogate and understand how policies and policy knowledge are mobilized among cities. A conceptualization of policy boosterism and its role in global-urban policymaking is developed by combining insights from the burgeoning “policy mobilities” literature with those of the longstanding literature on entrepreneurial city marketing. It is supported by illustrative examples of policy boosterism in Vancouver: the citys Greenest City and Green Capital initiatives, the use of the term “Vancouverism” among the citys urban design community, and demonstrations of new urban technologies during the 2010 Winter Olympics that were used to market a particular vision of the citys governance to people from elsewhere, but also—crucially—to local audiences. The article concludes by highlighting four foci that might frame future work at the intersections of policy boosterism and policy mobilities.

The local politics of policy mobility: Learning, persuasion, and the production of a municipal sustainability fix

The authors draw on the concept of a ‘sustainability fix’—a political discourse which allows development to proceed by accommodating both profit-making and environmental concerns—to analyze how municipalities muster support for development in the face of worries about negative environmental impacts. The case of Whistler, British Columbia, a tourist resort with an official orientation toward sustainable development, is used to illustrate the politics of balancing economic and environmental commitments. The authors deepen the sustainability fix concept by addressing: first, how such a fix is achieved through the assemblage of local and extralocal resources—specifically, ‘imported’ policy models which direct attention to certain definitions of problems and legitimate specific types of policy solutions; and second, how the politics of municipal policy-making is about more than contention and how it involves the sort of ongoing and broadly defined learning that has been largely undertheorized in the local politics literature. A key point is that local politics and policy making are always also extralocal in various ways. They involve a local politics of policy mobility. The authors expand on this premise to show how Whistlers model of sustainability planning has recently been circulated to other municipalities with similar social, economic, and environmental conditions.

A multi-disciplinary approach to policy transfer research: geographies, assemblages, mobilities and mutations

This paper outlines an approach to the global circulation of policies/models. This ‘policy assemblage, mobilities and mutations’ approach has emerged in recent years, primarily through the work of geographers. It is both inspired by, and somewhat critical of, the policy transfer approach associated with work in political science. Our argument is that the focus of geographers on place, space and scale, coupled with an anthropological/sociological attention to ‘small p’ politics both within and beyond institutions of governance, offers a great deal to the analysis of how policy-making operates, how policies, policy models and policy knowledge/expertise circulate and how these mobilities shape places. In making this argument, we first briefly review the literatures in human geography and urban studies that lie behind the current interest in the mobilisation of policies. We then outline the key elements of the policy transfer approach that these geographers have drawn upon and critiqued. In the third and fourth sections we compare and contrast these elements with those of the burgeoning policy mobilities approach. We then turn to the example of the Business Improvement District policy, which has been moved from one country to another, one city to another, in the process becoming constructed as a ‘model’ of/for economic development. We conclude the paper by arguing for an on-going multi-disciplinary conversation about the global circulation of policies, one in which geographers are involved alongside those from other disciplines, such as anthropology, history, planning and sociology, as well as political science.

Neotraditional Developments: The Anatomy of a New Urban Form.

Built at a small scale and incorporating many features of certain old-city neighborhoods, such as narrow streets and small setbacks, neotraditional developments have been designed by architects and built by a small number of developers on suburban greenfield sites since the early 1980s. The distinctive neotraditional urban form represents the convergence of certain aspects of two planning traditions—urban aesthetics and social utopianism. In this paper I outline the two traditions and show how they have been selectively appropriated by neotraditional architects and planners. I suggest that the recent restructuring and fragmentation in the suburban housing market has led to the creation of niche markets, such as the market for neotraditionalism. Using Pierre Bourdieus concept of habitus, I argue that the commercial success of neotraditional developments can be explained when recognition is given to the role of relatively affluent house buyers intent on creating a habitus and appropriating symbolic capital...

Governing sexuality and park space: acts of regulation in Vancouver, BC

This paper suggests that the coding and ordering of sexuality and space through definitions of which sexual practices and which representations of sexuality are morally appropriate in public space can be usefully understood as a problem of governance. We argue that attempts to hide or make visible specific sexualities in public space are complicated and politically charged because, while written regulations are relatively cut-and-dried, their implementation, by planners, judges, et al., involves significant discretion and leads to contingent, contestable outcomes. Furthermore, the politics of governing sexual morality and public space is made more problematic when the place where a hegemonic norm of behaviour or morality is publically challenged is an iconic park that attracts intense media attention. The paper elaborates these arguments through two interrelated case studies: a debate over the appropriate location of an AIDS memorial in Stanley Park, Vancouver and the reaction to the killing of a gay man who cruised the park for sex. We conclude by linking our argument to recent statements about the future of geographies of sexuality, arguing for analyses that acknowledge both the contingences and potentialities of categories like ‘the state,’ ‘governance,’ and ‘public space’ and also their structural tendencies and their ongoing association with sexual repression.

Mobilizing drug consumption rooms: inter-place networks and harm reduction drug policy

This article discusses the learning and politics involved in spreading Drug Consumption Rooms (DCRs) globally. DCRs are health facilities, operating under a harm reduction philosophy, where people consume illicit drugs in a supervised setting. Approximately 90 are located in almost 60 cities in 11 countries. They are intensely local attempts to improve the lives of specific populations and urban neighborhoods. DCRs are also global models that travel. This article examines the relationship between DCRs as facilities that are fixed in place and DCRs as globally-mobilized models of drug policy and public health practice. Drawing on research from seven countries, we apply concepts from the policy mobilities literature to analyze the travels of the DCR model and the political strategies involved in the siting of these public health service facilities. We detail the networked mobilization of the DCR model from Europe to Canada and Australia, the learning among facilities, the strategies used to mold the DCR model to local contexts, and the role of DCR staff in promoting continued proliferation of DCRs. We conclude by identifying some immobilities of DCRs to identify questions about practices, principles and future directions of harm reduction.