Urban Policy Mobilities and Global Circuits of Knowledge: Toward a Research Agenda

This article proposes an agenda for research into the spatial, social, and relational character of globally circulating urban policies, policy models, and policy knowledge. It draws on geographical political economy literatures that analyze particular social processes in terms of wider sociospatial contexts, in part by maintaining a focus on the dialectics of fixity and flow. The article combines this perspective with poststructuralist arguments about the analytical benefits of close studies of the embodied practices, representations, and expertise through which policy knowledge is mobilized. I suggest that the notion of mobilities offers a useful rubric under which to operationalize this approach to the “local globalness” of urban policy transfer. The utility of this research approach is illustrated by the example of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, a city that is frequently referenced by policymakers elsewhere as they look for “hot” policy ideas. The case also indicates that there is much research yet to be done on the character and implications of interurban policy transfer. Specifically, I argue that, while maintaining a focus on wider forces, studies of urban policy mobilities must take seriously the role that apparently banal activities of individual policy transfer agents play in the travels of policy models and must also engage in fine-grained qualitative studies of how policies are carried from place to place, learned in specific settings, and changed as they move. The final section offers theoretical and methodological questions and considerations that can frame future research into how, why, and with what consequences urban policies are mobilized globally.