A future research agenda for transformational urban policy studies

Abstract

There is a gap between the policy problems faced by twenty-first century cities and their proposed solutions, which are often small-scale, siloed and unsustainable. Cities face growing poverty, a rise in precarious work, unaffordable housing, decaying infrastructure, climate change, social polarisation and, most recently, a deadly infectious disease. The urban crisis is rooted in the failures of neoliberal policy characteristic of advanced capitalism, intersected with other systems of oppression. Turning the clock back to liberal urban policymaking will be insufficient. We propose a policy agenda that studies transformative urban movements, including local activism and movement building, policy agenda-setting and design, and policy implementation and evaluation. While these are the expertise of scholars of urban politics and policy studies, transformative urban movements have not been on their radar. In this article, we explore why and examine how urban politics and policy studies can ground and support transformative change.

Transformational change through Public Policy

“…2. Achieving transformational change through public policies necessitates sufficient force, often through social movements that reconceptualise problems and possibilities (see also Joy and Vogel, 2022). 3.…”

“…3. Transformational change often requires policy changes across sectors and levels of society, from local communities (Boullosa et al, 2022;Levac et al, 2022;Joy and Vogel, 2022) to national or global communities (Nohrstedt, 2022;Tosun et al, 2022;Sewerin et al, 2022). 4.…”

“…It is perhaps telling that three of our contributors to this special issue have indeed chosen to focus on various types of grassroots actors in analysing transformational change (Boullosa and Peres, 2022;Joy and Vogel, 2022;Levac et al, 2022). These contributions highlight how communities of engaged citizens can make their own (informal) public policies (Boullosa et al, 2022), social (urban) movements can be a force for change (Joy and Vogel, 2022), and people can (in collaboration with policy scholars) solve community problems (Levac et al, 2022). To put it differently, it is not that policy studies focuses on the wrong things, but rather that its ability to understand and foster changes in policy and society would be enhanced with a broader lens.…”

“…Thus, while policy scholars observe radical shifts in public attention and policy activity linked to social movements, the emphasis tends to be on the broad time scales necessary to justify such claims rather than on the mechanisms driving the change (for example, Baumgartner and Jones, 2016;. Boullosa et al (2022), Joy and Vogel (2022), and Levac et al (2022) all show how policy scholars can draw lessons from specific cases of citizen engagement and social movements to think more deeply about the drivers of transformational change.…”

The democratising capacity of new municipalism: beyond direct democracy in public–common partnerships

“…New municipalist practices are developed either by movements willing to engage with local public institutions, or by movement parties that manage to obtain power in local governments, for example, Barcelona en Comú (Barcelona), Grenoble en Commun (Grenoble), or Zagreb je naš (Zagreb). Its proponents argue that new municipalism has a democratising potential in that it re-articulates the relationship between social justice-oriented civil society organisations and local public institutions, forging alliances to progressively transform the city (Joy and Vogel, 2022). To ensure that these alliances endure and overcome election cycles, they should form public-common partnerships (Russell et al, 2022), that is, collaborative arrangements to manage and deliver public goods and services.…”