Conferences, informational infrastructures and mobile policies: the process of getting Sweden ‘BID ready’

Abstract

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.

The Mobility and/or Fixity of Urban and Planning Policies – The Role of Divergent Urban Planning Cultures

“…As processes of territorialization are always accompanied by conflicts or protests by local actors, whose positions seem to be threatened through the invention of new urban policies, they argue to look more precisely at the 'obstacles' and 'conflicts', which could considerably hinder the invention of new policies. Cook and Ward (2012) mention some elements, which certainly seem to refract the application of globally mobile urban policies in cities. Particularly they hint to the 'social and political acceptability' of elements of globally traveling policy models (like 'Business Improvement Districts') in certain socio-spatial contexts.…”

“…Urban assemblages figure as 'inventions' or 'formations' as they embody both modernization and continuation in urban governance for a certain time and territory. In vein with this approach Cook and Ward (2012) favour the idea to empirically examine the role of 'transitory assemblages of various elements -institutions, presentations, websites' in the process of construction, and hence fixing certain policy models in certain territories.…”

“…New assemblages could be detrimental for some policy actors in terms of political power, and in turn, legitimate the practices of other policy actors. Cook and Ward (2012) have further developed this approach to understand the mobility and circulation of policy models through the introduction of the concept of 'trans-urban policy pipelines'. Basically with that notion they mean the infrastructure and practices which facilitate the movement of policies (e.g.…”

“…What clearly comes up in all of these different approaches is that urban policies are not simply imported or implemented in certain local contexts, but that these policy models mutate in the course of movement and that they are a kind of refracted through historically developed local/regional political and planning cultures as well as through the social and economic structures of cities or regions (Cook and Ward (2012) refer to 'certain pathways and trajectories'; Stead (2012) to 'path-dependency and path-shaping'). However, until now, most of these scholars focus on a thorough analysis of the mobility of certain urban policies and their conscious mobilization by local policy actors.…”

“…In recent critical geographical and urban research literature the accelerated circulation of policy ideas and 'good' policy models has been theoretically packed into different concepts or notions like 'policies in motion' (Ward, 2006), 'policy mobilities ' (McCann, 2011;Temenos and McCann, 2012) 'trans -urban policy pipelines' (Cook and Ward, 2012), 'urban assemblages' (McFarlane, 2011;McCann and Ward, 2011b), or 'circulation of knowledge' (Robinson, 2011). From a basically political economic point of view, most of the scholars scrutinize, -which actors, institutions, organizations and technologies are involved in the development and dissemination of urban policy models, -who is benefiting from them in terms of power in certain locales, -which socio-spatial consequences the circulation of policy models in certain cities/regions produces, and more fundamentally, -how changes in urban governance and the making of cities could be explained.…”