Sustainable urbanism in the age of Photoshop: images, experiences and the role of learning through inhabiting the international travels of a planning model

Rapoport, Elizabeth

doi:10.1111/glob.12080

Cited by 25 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 54 publications

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“…Case studies of learning and pedagogical practices have covered diverse fields such as sustainable urban transition management (Sheldrick et al, 2017;Rapoport, 2015), higher education (Moore et al, 2015), transportation (Montero, 2017a;Walker, 2018) and public relations (Park et al, 2014), among others. A key action that supports learning involves comparative analysis and the generation of technical data.…”

Section: Actionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction: the centrality of arenas, agents and actions

Baker¹,

Walker²

2019

Public Policy Circulation

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Contemporary policy work is deeply informed by the circulation of policy initiatives and models from other jurisdictions. Sometimes close and at other times distant, the influence of various 'elsewheres' (Allen and Cochrane, 2007) has become a routine feature of the policy process. Researchers from a range of academic disciplines have matched the increased traffic of policy knowledge with a growing body of knowledge that seeks to document and understand it. While political scientists have the longest history of engagement with travelling policy, anthropologists, geographers, sociologists, urban planners and other social scientists have joined the fray in recent years, creating a lively multidisciplinary research effort (Benson and Jordan, 2011; McCann and Ward, 2012). Yet, for the most part, this research effort has been disjointed. Despite having a common interest at their core (the movement of policy), there are largely separate conversations occurring, structured around concepts such as policy diffusion, policy learning, policy transfer and policy mobility. These conversations have 'lived together apart' for some time now, but appear to be converging toward a focus on diverse arenas, agents and actions implicated in the circulation of policy. We have also seen shifts from structure-agency binaries to notions of contextually-embedded agency, from neat, spatially and temporally delimited processes to messy, ongoing processes, and from an exclusive interest in the 'why' of travelling policy to a broader set of research questions regarding the 'how'. In this book we use 'policy circulation' as an expedient umbrella term that signifies this emergent zone of common ground. We intend the notion of policy circulation to be largely agnostic (in ontological, epistemological and methodological terms), but it is inescapably oriented toward the work involved in moving policy and the ongoing nature of such efforts. It provides a loose conceptual and empirical space in which Policy Diffusion Policy diffusion emerged as a distinct area of inquiry in the 1960s, put to the task of studying patterns of intra-national policy adoption in the context of United States federalism. Policy diffusion studies seek to map and explain sequential patterning related to the uptake of 'policy innovations'-defined by Walker (1969, p. 881) as 'a program or policy which is new to the state adopting it'-to understand when and why certain jurisdictions adopt policies from other jurisdictions (see Simmons and Elkins, 2004; Levi-Faur, 2005; Simmons et al., 2006). Although the term 'policy diffusion' is often invoked to describe 'a process through which policy choices in one country affect those made in a second country', Marsh and Sharman (2009, pp. 270-71) argue that those researching policy diffusion more often have in mind 'a process of interdependent policy convergence'. Here, the choices of governments are not just interdependent, whereby 'the choice of a government influences the choices made by others and, conversely, the choice of a governmen...

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Section: Actionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction: the centrality of arenas, agents and actions

Baker¹,

Walker²

2019

Public Policy Circulation

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“…Using assemblage thinking, McFarlane (2011c) offers an understanding of policy learning as a social, geographical, and material process that prompts a shift in perception. Building on this account, Rapoport (2015), for example, examines the role of 'photoshopped' images of urban redevelopment in constituting the way policy actors learn about and, in a more affective register, 'inhabit' current and future policy scenarios. These accounts have been accompanied with studies of learning through 'policy tourism', wherein policy actors visit foreign places and sites to selfconsciously learn from their experiences (see González 2009;Cook and Ward 2011;Wood 2014).…”

Section: Revealing Labours Of Assemblingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assemblage thinking as methodology: commitments and practices for critical policy research

Baker

McGuirk

2016

Territory, Politics, Governance

206

147

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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.

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“…A second insight is that learning and educating shape the mobilisation of policy knowledge (McFarlane 2011;Rapoport 2015;Wood 2014Wood , 2016. Learning can be defined as "a knowledge acquisition process" (Dunlop 2009, p. 296) and educating as "the steering of learning towards particular desirable ends" (de Oliveira and Ahenakew 2013, p. 233).…”

Section: Policy Mobilties and Suburbiamentioning

confidence: 99%

Suburban policy mobilities: examining North American post-war engagements with Vällingby, Stockholm

Cook

2018

Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography

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This article calls for a detailed examination of the links between suburbia and the mobilisation of policy knowledge. With suburbanisation taking place across the world and the expanding literature on policy mobilities having little to say about the suburbs, this article begins to address this important gap in our collective understanding. It does this through a case study of Vällingby, a Stockholm suburb that captured the imagination of many planners and architects outside of Sweden during the 1950s and 1960s. Here the article considers the variegated ways in which planners and architects in North America engaged with Vällingby and used lessons learnt from Vällingby in their working practices. It focuses on the encounters with Vällingby by the New Yorkbased architect Clarence Stein as well as those involved in the planning of the metropolitan Toronto suburb of Flemingdon Park. In so doing, the article demonstrates that suburbs are important sites within the circulation of policy knowledge and that audiences elsewhere engage with such sites in a multiplicity of ways. It also challenges a perception of the USA as an exporter and not importer of suburban ideas and models.

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Sustainable urbanism in the age of Photoshop: images, experiences and the role of learning through inhabiting the international travels of a planning model

Abstract: Learning is one of the critical processes in enabling the

Cited by 25 publications

References 54 publications

Introduction: the centrality of arenas, agents and actions

Introduction: the centrality of arenas, agents and actions

Assemblage thinking as methodology: commitments and practices for critical policy research

Suburban policy mobilities: examining North American post-war engagements with Vällingby, Stockholm

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