Robert Pütz

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.

A Glimpse over the Rising Walls The Reflection of Post-Communist Transformation in the Polish Discourse of Gated Communities

The authors focus on societal perceptions of the Polish post-communist transformation as reflected in the rising discourse of gated communities. Guarded, (video-) controlled and/or walled housing estates have been on the sprawl in the Polish metropolises throughout the 1990s and 2000s. However, only recently they have been discursively constructed—under the banner of “gated communities”—as a social and political issue in the country. The authors look at this issue from a vantage point offered by Laclau and Mouffes theory of discourse, which allows the authors to combine a spatial and a linguistic analytical perspective. The analysis emphasizes the manner in which societal perceptions of borders surrounding gated communities overlap with perceptions of boundaries being inscribed in the social structure of post-communist Poland, while the resulting socio—spatial configurations are taken to signify political cleavages inherent in the Polish nation.

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.

Shaping the Urban Renaissance: New-build Luxury Developments in Berlin

Inner-city living is a hot topic in Germany. Policy-makers long for new middle- and upper-class residents; evidence of urban in-flight has been documented by scholars, and debates on reurbanisation are in full swing. This trend has also led to the emergence of a new housing product in German metropolises: high-priced, centrally located and newly built apartment and townhouse developments. In this paper, these luxury developments are analysed as part of a general process of urban restructuring and a focus is on the contradictions inherent to the idea of urbanity taking shape here. Guided by Foucault’s governmentality approach, new luxury developments are understood as a powerful reworking of how the city, its uses and users are imagined and governed. In doing so, the paper aims to show that the concept of governmentality enables a critique of current processes of urban restructuring that may enrich the on-going debates on gentrification.

Governing childhood through crime prevention: the case of the German school system

Over the last decade, numerous crime prevention programmes have been implemented across the German school sector. Although several serious violent attacks have happened in the last 12 years in German schools, the emergence of crime prevention programmes within the education sector cannot simply be conceived as a reaction to a rise in youth crime. Following Michel Foucaults writings on power and governmentality, and drawing upon extracts of a discourse analysis of crime prevention programmes and political speeches, we argue that crime prevention within German schools signifies a new mode of governing childhood. Although we focus on Germany, our findings may illustrate an international trend within education policy, which first tends to spatialise socio-structural problems and transform them into local solutions, and second seeks to create childhood subjectivities that cause children to feel responsible for their own safety, while simultaneously subjecting children and young people to wide-ranging social control via area-based networks.