Global urban policy and the geopolitics of urban data

Enora Robin,Michele Acuto

doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2018.08.013

Enora Robin, Michele Acuto

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2018.08.013

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Abstract

Cities have gained prominence in global sustainability discourses. The United Nations ‘2030 Agenda’ highlights in at least four key agreements the need to engage local stakeholders as key partners for the implementation of global policy objectives. As a result, the rise of a ‘cities agenda’ has led not only to an increased role for cities in global politics but also to a reshaping of the knowledge-base underpinning international agreements and their implementation. This paper argues that the contemporary willingness to move beyond the “territorial trap” of modern geopolitics, by emphasizing cities’ agency in global affairs and by calling for the production of globally comparable urban data, induces a process of reframing and rescaling existing understandings of the global. In that sense, the question of urban knowledge production – especially that of urban data creation – is an essentially geopolitical one. However, insights from critical geopolitics have been rarely used in current debates on global urban policy and urban data politics. This work, we posit, can inform current academic and policy discussions, as it invites us to explore three interrelated questions: how is the urban being written into contemporary global politics? What type of ‘urban’ issues are made salient/invisible in that process? Which geopolitical actors are currently dominating the production of urban knowledge globally? This paper offers to start addressing those themes, through the study of 28 global urban databases, digging into the technical as well as human components of those. In doing so, we offer a preliminary assessment of techno-political apparatus that underpins the construction of a global ‘urban gaze’ which in turn shapes - as much as it is maintained by - global urban policy frameworks and hegemonic forms of knowledge production.

Highlights

Cities have gained prominence in contemporary global sustainability discourses
We used network mapping to assess the prominence of specific actors in driving the international sustainable urbanization agenda and the production of urban data at a global scale. By looking at those different aspects of the global urban data architecture we hope to show that studying the geopolitics of urban knowledge implies paying attention to the content of existing urban knowledge bases; it implies looking into dominant modes of knowing the urban; and to identify the sites of global urban knowledge production and how those relate to global policy arena
In reviewing the objectives stated in the NUA and SDG11, we found that the urban question is framed around 17 policy sectors8 in global urban policy (Fig. 3)

Summary

Introduction

Cities have gained prominence in contemporary global sustainability discourses. Numerous United Nations processes and events, cityled activities and initiatives from the private and civil society sectors emphasise their importance as sites of opportunities and solutions to global challenges. The adoption of an “urban” Sustainable Development Goal (SDG11) on inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable cities has “framed the city in a discourse of urban opportunity for addressing a range of global problems” (Barnett & Bridge, 2016) These UN frames have emerged in a landscape where cities themselves have been progressively active in claiming a stake in international affairs (Curtis, 2016), with growing numbers of formalized city networks advocating an urban presence across a vast variety of policy domains (Acuto and Rayner, 2016). This, they argue, would imply going beyond state-centric reporting and data collection frameworks much of the UN system is currently predicated upon (Robin, Steenmans & Acuto, 2017; Barnett & Parnell, 2016; Simon et al, 2016) to ensure it includes city-level information (Birch, 2018; Acuto, Robin & Lane, 2018)

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