Recent years have witnessed the beginnings of a renaissance in the field of comparative urban studies. The paper discusses this body of work’s history, drawing on contributions from across the social sciences. Following this it highlights some of the work’s limits, namely its weak theorization of place, scale and causality. The paper then offers a relational comparative approach to the study of cities as a means of attending to these limits. This acknowledges both the territorial and relational geographies behind the production of cities.

This article examines the ways in which business improvement districts are being introduced into UK cities. In advancing this analysis, the focus here is on the means through which one or two Manhattan business improvement districts have been constructed as 'models' of urban management, taken out of their particular local/regional and national contexts and introduced into a diverse set of local political economic contexts in UK cities and towns. Examining the way business improvement districts have become a policy in motion, the article sketches out the emergence of entrepreneurial urban governance arrangements in the UK as part of the state's changing spatiality in the industrialized economies of Western Europe and North America. I argue that these changes make UK cities and towns increasingly receptive to the business improvement district model of downtown management. Seeking to move beyond the sometimes rather one-sided representations of policies that find themselves on the move, the article seeks to connect the 'exporting' and 'importing' zones of policy transfer, arguing for an open and permeable conceptualization of these places. It draws on work in Manhattan, New York to unpack the nature of the political-economic relations that business improvement districts were part of, before moving on to examine the dynamics of policy transfer and the early days of the introduction of this downtown 'model' into UK cities. Copyright (c) 2006 The Authors. Journal Compilation (c) 2006 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

This is a short response to Benson and Jordan's 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.

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. IntroductionWe both work on 'urban policy and politics'-research with a seemingly clear set of study sites. Yet recently we have found ourselves doing our fieldwork in all manner of situations that we might not have expected: conference halls, corporate offices, drug consumption rooms, minibuses, cafés, and hotel bars. Of course, these are the types of settings that many human geographers inhabit as they conduct qualitative research. More surprising for us has been the range of cities in which we have been doing this fieldwork. We have found ourselves moving from one place to another quite frequently, rather than remaining in the cities we think we are studying-our 'field sites'. Why have we found ourselves in these situations? Well, because we have been striving to make good methodologically on the relational theorizations of cities offered by Massey (1993), Robinson (2006), and Amin (2007) amongst others. We have been following the policies that develop in, move among, and shape the character of cities in ways that others follow 'things' or commodities through supply chains or production networks (Freidberg, 2001;Marcus, 1995). Our work asks how policy actors circulate policies among cities, how they draw on circulating policy knowledge, and how and for whom they put these engagements to use as they assemble their own 'local' policies and, by extension, their own cities.The title of this paper, "Assembling urbanism", was the working title of our recent book. Eventually, the book's title became Mobile Urbanism (McCann and Ward, 2011). It collects a number of theoretically informed, detailed empirical case studies of territorial and relational elements of urban policy. The contributions examine policy in many forms: written policies, policy models and best practices, policy knowledge, policy responses to specific concerns, and the sociospatial manifestations of policy work. In doing so, the book challenges understandings of policy as technical, rational.

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