Abstract
In this paper, we highlight the importance for policy mobility research to engage with the ‘multiple temporalities’ of globally prevalent urban policy ideas to understand how these eventually come to shape localities incrementally, and as we show, in sometimes unexpected manners. Through the study of over 10 years of (failed) redevelopment policies in Cape Town’s East City, we formulate two distinct contributions to existing urban policy mobility research. Firstly, we show that looking at the micro-politics of policy mobility in particular places, and over time, can help elucidate how conflicts and resistance to globally mobile urban models shape which aspects of a policy solutions are rendered mobile or immobile, present or absent and, finally, what ends up being implemented in the local context through specific projects. Secondly, we expand on new materialist approaches to urban policy mobility, bringing insights from performativity theory, to look at how ideas and models come to be ‘enacted’ in the real world through various and, perhaps more importantly, uncoordinated means. Our case study shows that policy mobility research should attend to disparate, uncoordinated, more-than-human activities, and how these end up shaping places even in the absence of purposive planning. That way, we show how changing and complex configurations of more than human networks, objects, money, buildings, etc. support the concrete performance of abstract and mobile urban models – in place and over time.
Highlights
Through a case study of urban transformation in Cape Town’s East City, this article focused on the politics of time and performance in urban policy mobilities studies
Shedding light on the micro-politics and material enactments that shaped the iterative and non-linear local translation of globally pervasive innovation and design-led urban development models, we sought to show how including a performative optic into our conceptual repertoire can help us to further understand the ‘multiple temporalities’ (Wood, 2015) of particular urban models
Our analysis of the differentformative phases in the East City’s transformations helped us to unsettle seemingly absolute notions of success and failure, showing that while urban modelling interventions might sometimes fail on the official project level, they can still succeed as decoupled forms of urban interventions, leaving floating urban models to be performed by non-policy actors, enacted in a constellation of residual practices, norms and material objects
Summary
Urban policy mobilities research has explored how popular policy trends and frameworks emerge (e.g. Gonzales, 2011; Hoyt, 2006; Pow, 2014; Ward, 2006), move to and land in particular places, highlighting how these mutate as they are enacted in distinct locations (Cohen, 2015; Cook, 2008; Didier et al, 2012; Fisher, 2014; McCann and Ward, 2010; Peck, 2011; Peck and Theodore, 2010). Looking at the performativity of particular material and discursive formations supporting the local reception of urban models – “the practice of best practice” as it has been called by Bulkeley (2006) – can help provide thick description of how urban models shape places over time This proposition invites us to trace the anchoring of urban models through analysing the changing material, discursive and social configurations that enhance or hinder their enactment (McCann, 2011) at different points in time. This attention to the performativity of urban models infers looking at the role of documents, plans and technologies, as vessels that facilitate learning or movement, but as material generators of coalitions that can bring new publics into being and anchor mobile policies in particular places We focus on the performativity of traveling models and the politics of time to further unpack the micro-politics that shape their concrete, non-linear enactment
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