This paper examines the ways in which policies are transferred between places: how they are disembedded from, and re-embedded into, new political, economic and social contexts. To do this, the paper will draw upon a case study of the transfer of Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) from the US to England and Wales. Within this, the paper demonstrates how they were a response to fiscal problems facing city centre management in England and Wales; how US BIDs were socially constructed as 'successful' and 'transferable'; and how the BID 'model' was reshaped prior to and following its rolling-out in England and Wales. The paper concludes by stressing six wider conceptual points about the nature of urban policy transfer.

This paper makes a contribution to the fledgling literature on policy mobilities and mutations. Using the example of the internationalization of the Business Improvement District (BID) model, it argues that conferences constitute important arenas in and through which both the mobilizing and embedding of urban policies can occur. Focusing on a two-day conference that took place in Sweden in 2009, it uses the language of trans-urban policy pipelines in order to capture the formation of relationships over distance as a means of comparing, educating and learning about the experiences of other cities. Revealing the complex architectures and ecologies that have underpinned the movement of this model from one country to another and from one city to another over the last two decades or so, the paper uses a combination of ethnographic techniques together with semi-structured interviews and questionnaires with organizers and participants to produce a single-site but relationally thickened description of the place of conferences in facilitating the movement of policies across space.

It will be argued in this paper that the problematic of social cohesion is also one of socio-ecological cohesion whereby the urbanisation of nature and its socioenvironmentally enabling and disabling conditions are key processes. By viewing the contradictions of the urbanisation process as intrinsically socio-ecological ones, the terrain of social cohesion is shifted both epistemologically and politically. The paper critically examines three contemporary schools of thought that consider in different ways the relationship between cities, social cohesion and the environment. It begins with a critical examination of the notion of urban sustainability. The paper will then move on to consider two approaches that emphasise issues of (in)equality and (in)justice in the urban environment, those of environmental justice and urban political ecology. The final part of the paper pinpoints four areas of research that urban researchers must examine if we are to understand more fully-and act more politically on-the nexus between cities, social cohesion and the environment.

Although it has many merits, the voluminous literature on urban governance gives scant attention to the actual involvement and positioning of business elites and businesses within Public-Private Partnerships. There is also little consensus among academics as to why the private sector become involved in such schemes. This paper begins to address these issues through a critical empirical examination of how and why the private sector is involved with three English Town Centre Management (TCM) partnerships and the Business Improvement District (BID) subsidiaries all three partnerships have recently developed. In order to do this, the empirical study is guided by a conceptual framework that foregrounds the relationship between (a) the opening up and monitoring of 'institutional space' by partnerships and the state, and (b) the motivations and 'constrained agency' of the business elites. The paper demonstrates that the positioning of the private sector is more multifarious and fractured than previous studies of urban governance have suggested. It also reveals that business elites and businesses view their participation as an 'investment' that needs to accrue significant financial returns and that partnership and state officials are highly selective in their choice of 'who governs'.

This article builds upon a relatively small but growing literature in geography, planning and cognate disciplines that seeks to understand the variegated geographies and histories of policy mobilities. The article uses a case study of an exchange trip between town planners in the Soviet Union and the UK between 1957 and 1958. It focuses on the experiences of the British planners in the Soviet Union and sets the tour within the wider context of a fluctuating and sometimes turbulent history of Anglo‐Soviet politics, travels and connections. In doing this, the article makes three arguments: first, there is much to be gained by bringing together the geography‐dominated policy mobilities literature with that on exchanges and visits by architects, engineers and planners. Secondly, the greater sensitivity to the histories of policy mobilities allows contemporary studies to be contextualized in the longer history of organized learning between different urban professions. Thirdly, despite the long history of policy mobilities, what differentiates the current era from previous eras is the prominent ‘knowledge intermediary’ roles now played by consultancies and think tanks. As the article will demonstrate, it was branches of government and professional bodies, rather than consultancies and think tanks, that tended to dominate such roles previously.