Assemblage thinking as methodology: commitments and practices for critical policy research. Territory, Politics, Governance. The concept of assemblage has captured the attention of critical social scientists, including those interested in the study of policy. Despite ongoing debate around the implications of assemblage thinking for questions of structure, agency, and contingency, there is widespread agreement around its value as a methodological framework. There are now many accounts using assemblage-inflected methodologies of various sorts as analytical tools for revealing, interpreting, and representing the worlds of policy-making, though few are explicit about their methodological practice. In this paper, we identify a suite of epistemological commitments associated with assemblage thinking, including an emphasis on multiplicity, processuality, labour, and uncertainty, and then consider explicitly how such commitments might be translated into methodological practices in policy research. Drawing on a research project on the development and enactment of homelessness policy in Australia, we explore how three methodological practices ¿ adopting an ethnographic sensibility, tracing sites and situations, and revealing labours of assembling ¿ can be used to operationalize assemblage thinking in light of the challenges of conducting critical policy research. AbstractThe concept of assemblage has captured the attention of critical social scientists, including those interested in the study of policy. Despite ongoing debate around the implications of assemblage thinking for questions of structure, agency, and contingency, there is widespread agreement around its value as a methodological framework. There are now many accounts using assemblage inflected methodologies of various sorts as analytical tools for revealing, interpreting, and representing the worlds of policy-making, though few are explicit about their methodological practice. In this paper, we identify a suite of epistemological commitments associated with assemblage thinking, including an emphasis on multiplicity, processuality, labour, and uncertainty, and then consider explicitly how such commitments might be translated into methodological practices in policy research. Drawing on a research project on the development and enactment of homelessness policy in Australia, we explore how three methodological practices-adopting an ethnographic sensibility, tracing sites and situations, and revealing labours of assembling-can be used to operationalise assemblage thinking in light of the challenges of conducting critical policy research.

This article critically examines the expression of global spatial imaginaries in urban policy and planning. Following recent calls to understand how the global is 'made up' in and through cities, we argue for the usefulness of Roy and Ong's concept of 'worlding'. By analysing how strategic spatial plans envisage 'Global Sydney', the article reveals a constitutive spatial imaginary informed by the articulation of three interrelated elements: global city standards, comparative techniques and extra-local policy models. Unpacking how cities are selectively worlded through spatial imaginaries, the article advances an approach to urban globality as actively cultivated and differentially produced.We wish to thank Pauline McGuirk for her incisive comments on an earlier draft; Tom Baker gratefully acknowledges her guidance as doctoral supervisor. We also thank the three anonymous IJURR reviewers, whose suggestions helped clarify the article. The article benefited from feedback provided at the Institute of Australian Geographers (Sydney, 2012) and Urban Affairs Association (San Francisco, 2013) conferences.

An increasing number of scholars are focusing attention on the circulation of urban policies and the concept of ‘policy mobilities’. This collection of short commentaries identifies emerging areas of interest and contention for urban policy mobilities researchers. Exploring issues from conceptual dualisms and topological thinking to interdisciplinarity and slow methodologies, the commentaries offer refinements and suggest new pathways for urban policy mobilities research in the future.

Over the last fifteen years, programs based on ‘housing first’ models have swept to prominence as solutions to homelessness. Such programs serve a small subset of the overall homeless population, namely the ‘chronically’ homeless, offering direct access to permanent housing with comprehensive and flexible support services attached. Hailed as socially progressive responses to homelessness—based on their opposition to traditional emphases on client passivity, sobriety and moralised deservingness—the popularity of housing first models has often depended on congruence with wider projects of welfare retrenchment and fiscal austerity. Despite the rapid globalisation and high public profile of housing first ideas, they have been largely overlooked in geographical accounts of homeless governance. In response, this article discusses the growing importance and influence of housing first ideas, before looking to contemporary debates on homeless governance for interpretive insights. Informed by these debates, we sketch conceptual areas to which future research on housing first models and programs might attend: first, to their ambivalent politics and, second, to the processes and practices of translation that are central to their implementation and political consequence. Moving beyond questions of operational efficacy, efficiency and fidelity, we call for critical but constructive accounts focused on the constitutive relations between housing first ideas and governance transformations at and across a range of scales and sites.

Emergencies such as COVID‐19 trigger calls for innovation and invoke forced experimentation. They can shift what is thinkable and thus licence social and institutional change, opening space wherein new sociopolitical arrangements might emerge. Cities are at the heart of the COVID‐19 emergency, in terms of impact, management, and solutions. This commentary considers the implications of COVID‐19 for urban governance innovation. Incrementally, innovation has become a “new normal” across multiple fields of social, economic, technological, and environmental endeavour as disruptive enhancements are sought to address complex problems: urban governance is no exception. In cities, diverse new ecosystems of innovative urban governance have been emerging with the potential to reshape the politics and parameters of urban decision making, produce new institutional settings, reconstitute cities' multiscalar relations, and invoke new forms of power. This commentary considers urban governance innovation in COVID times. Drawing from Australian and international examples, we reflect on the actors taking centre stage as cities' responses to the pandemic take shape and consider the governing mechanisms being evoked. As these innovations embed more deeply the distributed nature of urban governance, we close with thoughts on the risks and opportunities that COVID‐19 presents for seeking inclusive innovation in the field of urban governance.