Georg Glasze

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.

Social and Political Dimensions of the OpenStreetMap Project: Towards a Critical Geographical Research Agenda

Critical cartographic scholarship has demonstrated that maps (and geoinformation in general) can never be neutral or objective: maps are always embedded in specific social contexts of production and use and thus unavoidably reproduce social conventions and hierarchies. Furthermore, it has been argued that maps also (re)produce certain geographies and thus social realities. This argument shifts attention to the constitutive effects of maps and the ways in which they make the world. Within the discussion on neogeography and volunteered geographic information, it has been argued that crowd sourcing offers a radical alternative to conventional ways of map making, challenging the hegemony of official and commercial cartographies. In this view, crowd-sourced Web 2.0-mapping projects such as OpenStreetMap (OSM) might begin to offer a forum for different voices, mapping new things, enabling new ways of living. In our contribution, we frame a research agenda that draws upon critical cartography but widens the scope of analysis to the assemblages of practices, actors, technologies, and norms at work: an agenda which is inspired by the “critical GIS”-literature, to take the specific social contexts and effects of technologies into account, but which deploys a processual view of mapping. We recognize that a fundamental transition in mapping is taking place, and that OSM may well be of central importance in this process. However, we stress that social conventions, political hegemonies, unequal economic and technical resources etc. do not fade away with crowdsourced Web 2.0 projects, but rather transform themselves and impact upon mapping practices. Together these examples suggest that research into OSM might usefully reflect more critically on the contexts in which new geographic knowledge is being assembled.

Learning from failed policy mobilities: Contradictions, resistances and unintended outcomes in the transfer of “Business Improvement Districts” to Germany

This paper contributes to the debates on policy mobilities by examining Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) in Germany as examples of contested, failed and unfinished travelling policies. Recent debates on policy mobilities opened a fruitful discussion on how policies are transferred from one place to another and the complex processes that rework places and policies in heterogeneous ways. While we are sympathetic to this literature, there are theoretical and empirical gaps to be addressed. It is frequently stated that processes around the transfer and grounding of policies are complex, and that outcomes are far from secure. However, the empirical focus in most cases is on transfers that are more or less “successful”, or at least portrayed as being successful by their advocates. In contrast to this “success bias” in research and public discourse, we argue that it is helpful to focus more closely on failures, resistances and contradictions. Judging from work on the transfer of BIDs – an almost classical example of successfully mobilized urban policies – we argue that it is helpful to reflect on unfinished policy mobilities, that is, the failure of mobilized urban policies.

Discourse analysis in German-language human geography: integrating theory and method

In the context of various conceptual turns in German-language human geography over the past decades (e.g., linguistic, cultural, and material turns), which have been adopted largely via writings from English-language human geography, theoretical perspectives in these two academic communities have been converging. However, there are still aspects that are quite distinctive for debates in the German-language context. We argue that, for example, in the case of poststructuralist approaches, a distinct development has taken place, which emphasizes the links between theoretical, methodological, and methods-oriented empirical research, e.g., through the operationalization of linguistic methods. Following Michel Foucaults notion of ‘discourse’, these empirical analyses are often referred to as ‘discourse analyses’. This paper gives an overview of the field of discourse analysis in German-language human geography and discusses possible reasons for the different ways in which discourse theories have been emerged and developed in English-language and German-language geography. We argue that there are three developments which make ‘discourse analyses’ in the German context distinct: (1) the significance of theoretical debates on the role of the subject, (2) the intensive interdisciplinary networks within the wider context of German-language social sciences and linguistics, and (3) closely related to the second point, the strong emphasis on questions of methodical implementation.

Drei Jahrzehnte area-basierte Stadtpolitik in Frankreich: die politique de la ville

ZusammenfassungIn Frankreich werden seit den 1970er Jahren Maßnahmen ergriffen, durch die einer Konzentration sozialer und städtebaulicher Probleme mit einer spezifischen Förderung bestimmter Stadtquartiere begegnet werden soll. Der Beitrag argumentiert, dass damit letztlich gesellschaftliche Probleme als Probleme bestimmter Quartiere behandelt werden. Dabei wird der historische Hintergrund der Stadtentwicklung in den französischen Vorstädten dargestellt und es werden die Ziele und Maßnahmen der politique de la ville beschrieben. Die massiven Vorortunruhen von 2005 haben dazu geführt, dass der raumorientierte Ansatz der politique de la ville teilweise grundlegend kritisiert wurde. Vor diesem Hintergrund wird abschließend diskutiert, ob und gegebenenfalls inwieweit in den letzten Jahren eine grundlegende Neuausrichtung der politique de la ville erfolgt ist.AbstractSince the 1970s, measures have been taken in France to fight a concentration of social and town planning problems by subsidizing certain town quarters in a specific way. The article argues that social problems are eventually being treated as problems of certain quarters. The historical background of the urban development in French suburbs will be described as well as the objectives and measures of the politique de la ville. The massive riots of 2005 in the suburbs have led to a basic criticism of the space-oriented approach of the politique de la ville. Against this background, it will finally be discussed if and, where applicable, in which way the politique de la ville has undergone a basic reorientation in the last few years.