Urban policy assemblage: Outcomes and processes of public art policy assemblage

Abstract

In an era of international flows of policy ideas, when many cities apply the ‘same’ policy ideas, their local translations can be substantially different. Yet, urban studies have not provided sufficient tools to compare such translations among a wide number of cities. We develop a methodological program that operationalizes into a quantitative analysis the rich Policy Assemblage framework often used to compare selected cases. We distinguish between assemblage as a process and assemblage as an outcome, and argue that both are important for urban policy mobility studies. While assemblage as a process is often seen as the thicker description, assemblage outcomes provide central snapshots that reveal the broader process and make its concrete configurations evident. Using the case of public art policies and the mechanism of the Percent of Public Art, we compare the assemblage outcome of the idea in 26 cities with more than one million residents in the Anglosphere. We ask, how do cities assemble policy discourses, and what is the logic that differentiates cities from one another? We find cities use multiple discourses which refer to the socio-economic, cultural identity and the spatial dimensions of public art in cities. Nevertheless, when cities assemble these discourses, the socio-economic dimension tends to define a central cleavage between cities. To examine how such a cleavage is constructed, we examine the assembly process of Toronto more closely.