Susan Moore

Planning Histories and Practices of Circulating Urban Knowledge

This symposium creates and stimulates new dialogue and cross-disciplinary exchange between planning theorists and geographers in researching the transfer of urban policy and planning models, ideas and techniques. The symposium challenges a restricted historical focus in much of the emerging geographical literature on urban policy mobilities by drawing on a rich tradition within planning history of exploring and documenting the trans-urban travel of planning ideas and models over the last 150 years. It is argued that this longer-term perspective is required to highlight important historical continuities and institutional legacies to contemporary urban policy circuits and pathways and to question what is particularly new, distinct and innovative about an intensification in the travel of urban ideas, plans and policies over the past decade — and the accompanying scholarly interest in them. The symposium also uses the emphasis on particular details and specific experiences within planning histories to foreground and develop approaches, particularly from recent geographical scholarship, that investigate the contingent and embodied practices and wider epistemic contexts that enable — or hinder — contemporary policy transfer.

What’s Wrong with Best Practice? Questioning the Typification of New Urbanism

Best practice is most often perceived as a powerful heuristic tool for the dissemination of innovation and knowledge. Hence, its formation and acceptance are seldom questioned. The unquestioned compliance with practices labelled as ‘best’, however, obscures the processes of typification that enable it—that is to say, the cultural struggles, tensions, conflicts, collaborations, alliances and personal/professional justifications that prefigure it. This paper uses the proliferation of New Urbanism in Toronto to unpack theoretically the typification of best practice in order to demonstrate how the universal abstraction of this principle-based movement is underpinned by deeper, highly situated, constructions of aligned interests and emergent socio-political rationalities.

Delivering sustainable buildings and communities: eclipsing social concerns through private sector-led urban regeneration and development

Increasingly, government urban growth strategies support streamlined planning and development processes that soften conditions for private sector developers in the construction and development of “sustainable buildings” and “sustainable communities”. Encouraged by a popular embracing of urban intensification as an approach to urban development, these strategies often strengthen the role of private sector intermediaries and consultants in local policy networks (Hackworth and Smith 2001, Adair et al. 2003, Steinacker 2003, Davidson and Lees 2005). Public sector reliance on private sector finance, skills and resources in the delivery of a sustainable built environment has been documented as problematic due to the proliferation of less than optimal sustainable performances, rising land values and expensive housing developments in many new and regenerated areas of our towns and cities (Adair et al. 2003, Lees 2003, Bromley et al. 2005, Krueger and Agyeman 2005, Raco 2005, 2007, Boddy 2007, Gibbs and Krueger 2007, Keil 2007). Generic design, inequitable access to sustainable spaces, unchecked costs, market premiums and un(der)regulated design quality compliance are amongst a host of concerns, complicating the aspirational intentions of policymakers dependent on the private delivery of the “public good” of sustainability. The onset of a global credit crisis puts the reliance on the risk-averse private development sector to deliver sustainable built environments into poignant, and yet evocatively transformative, relief. Surprisingly, however, there is little critical discussion within the existing literature on the direct linkages between private sector involvement in policy networks and processes and the optimisation of the physical and social environments that result from the planning and construction of so-called sustainable buildings and communities. A growing literature expands upon the relationships and tensions between neo-liberal governance and urban sustainability, but case studies specifically addressing “on the ground” associations between public sector policy and private sector delivery for the production of sustainable buildings and communities are few. Hence, the critical space for this special issue, which emerges out of two very successful sessions of the 2008 Association for American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting in Boston, MA, USA. The idea for the sessions originated from our mutual interest and involvement in research at the knowledge– policy–practice interface of urban development and regeneration in Canada and the UK. Our early discussions quickly turned to the problems and opportunities associated with the noted convergence of public and private sectors in the implementation of sustainable urban regeneration and development schemes in cities, and in particular the underscrutinised role of private sector development interests in the formulation and delivery of growth-related public policy agendas. The conference sessions addressed neo-liberal governance restructuring and influence but specifically focused on a discussion of localised

The 2012 Olympic Learning Legacy Agenda – the intentionalities of mobility for a new London model

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the emergence of a Learning Legacy Agenda (LLA) in the wake of the London 2012 Olympic Games as a governmental tool for the dissemination of urban development and infrastructure project delivery best practice. Focusing on the inception, coordination and implementation of the LLA we outline the intentionalities of mobility that underpin its formation and appropriation and suggest how this points to the emergence of a new “London model” of development and governance. Three intentionalities of knowledge capture, public duty and extra-local salience are unpacked to demonstrate the range of ways in which the bureaucratically initiated LLA banner has been used by various development actors and organisations to validate their existing practices. The case study of the LLA as an institutionalised governance apparatus is used to analyse the impact of specific forms of social relations on the ways in which “models” are produced, what their content consists of, how dominant agendas and narratives co-evolve with the priorities of an assemblage of actors and the processes of selective abstraction used to curate particular messages and forms of fixed and potentially mobile knowledge, yet dubious claims of “learning”.

Researching Local Development Cultures: Using the Qualitative Interview as an Interpretive Lens

Abstract This paper directs critical reflection on the use and treatment of qualitative interviews in researching building and development actors, processes and outcomes. Using the case study of New Urbanism in Toronto, it argues that norms of self-presentation and impression management consciously or unconsciously enacted by development professionals (developers, builders, designers, planners) within the research interview constitute key data that are often overlooked in planning and urban development-related research. More often than not, such study is geared towards typifying development processes, identifying and prescribing industry ‘best practices’ and evaluating the relative success of outcomes on the ground. It is argued here that a finer grained coding of interviews with key project-based actors directs attention to the hybrid and contingent nature of social roles in development networks and processes. This challenges researchers to examine more rigorously the identities, strategies, constraints and rationalities of development professionals to gain a deeper understanding of their agency in the (re)production of urban form and the definition of local development cultures.