Abstract
The geographical literature on urban policymaking has made a considerable contribution to enabling understandings of the relational processes involved in assembling local policies. Reviewing this literature’s journey from its origins in political science to its recent embrace of poststructuralism, this article argues that the debates and discussions involved have arrived at a point of core epistemological tension. Taking its own conceptual inspiration from thinking interurban space topologically, the article thus raises a number of questions regarding the assumptions associated with terms such as mobility and circulation, persistent in the languages of policy research and practice. Exploring these questions through a post-colonial ethnography of sustainable city visions in Lusaka, Zambia, and Sacramento, California, the article subsequently makes a series of contributions regarding the way policymaking regimes remain powerfully situated in space and time. To properly account for the workings of power and its ability to colonize policy practices, the article challenges us to therefore reflect on the value of transitioning away from thinking about policy ideas as capable of being mobile, circulated from place to place, and to instead unpack how particular territorial representations of place are (re)produced (including by geographers) within the confines of hegemonic ideas about city futures.
Highlights
The phenomenon of urban policy mobility increasingly transcends its status as an interdisciplinary area of academic study concerned with mapping the geographies of neoliberalism
I argue that urban policy ideas, practices, and knowledges do not move from place to place but, rather, said places are continually produced and reproduced within the very confines of the ideas we seek to attribute with a “mobile” identity
This article set out to address the question of what the topological geographies of policymaking, well developed within critical accounts of the literature on policy mobility, do
Summary
In the introduction to their recent collection Public Policy Circulation: Arenas, Agents and Actions, Baker and Walker (2019) stated that they intend: the notion of policy circulation to be largely agnostic (in ontological, epistemological and methodological terms), but it is inescapably orientated toward the work involved in moving policy and the ongoing nature of such efforts. (2, italics added). Existing debates regarding the relative speed of policy adoption—for example, “fast” transfer (Peck and Theodore 2015) versus “slow” learning (Wood 2015)—privilege an attention to the issue of time while overlooking the question of how supposed spatial distance is constructed for mobility to even be conceivable Interested in opening this up, rather than adopting the all-encompassing approach of a discipline interested in relational and territorial geographies, how might we understand the relationship between these two important concepts (territory and relationality) as they pertain to geographically informed understandings of urban policymaking? As described by Allen (2008), in a “topological landscape, fixed distances and well-defined proximities fail to convey how the specific relational ties of power are established” (4) The implications this has for how we understand the relationship between geography and policy are profound and encourage a much deeper engagement with the materialist ontologies from which concepts such as assemblage and topology have been productively harvested by geographers (Paasi 2011). Rather than pursuing what Saldanha (2009) described as “postmodern forays into the infinite sumptuousness of representation” (306), how can (and should) we account for the very material reproduction of urban policy territories?
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