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Urban Policy Mobilities and Global Circuits of Knowledge: Toward aResearch AgendaEugene McCanna

a Department of Geography, Simon Fraser University,

First published on: 29 October 2010

To cite this Article McCann, Eugene(2011) 'Urban Policy Mobilities and Global Circuits of Knowledge: Toward a ResearchAgenda', Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 101: 1, 107 — 130, First published on: 29 October 2010(iFirst)To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/00045608.2010.520219URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2010.520219

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Urban Policy Mobilities and Global Circuits ofKnowledge: Toward a Research Agenda

Eugene McCann

Department of Geography, Simon Fraser University

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

Este artıculo propone una agenda de investigacion del caracter espacial, social y relacional de las polıticasurbanas que circulan a escala global, de los modelos de polıticas y el conocimiento sobre polıticas. El artıculose apoya en las literaturas de economıa polıtica que analizan procesos sociales particulares en terminos decontextos socioespaciales mas amplios, conservando en parte enfocada la dialectica de fijeza y flujo. El artıculocombina esta perspectiva con argumentos posestructuralistas sobre los beneficios analıticos de estudios cerradossobre practicas intrınsecas, representaciones y experticia, por medio de las cuales se moviliza la polıtica delconocimiento. Mi sugerencia es que la nocion de movilidades ofrece una util rubrica bajo la cual operacionalizareste enfoque para la “globalidad local” de transferencia de polıtica urbana. La utilidad de este enfoque deinvestigacion se ilustra con el ejemplo de Vancouver, Columbia Britanica, Canada, una ciudad que confrecuencia es referida en otras partes por los gestores de polıticas, en tanto andan a la caza de ideas “calidas”sobre el particular. El caso muestra tambien que existe todavıa mucho por investigar sobre el caracter eimplicaciones de la transferencia de polıticas interurbanas. Especıficamente arguyo que, al tiempo que mantienena la vista el interes por fuerzas de mayor amplitud, los estudios de movilidades de polıticas urbanas debenconsiderar seriamente el papel que juegan las actividades aparentemenmte banales de los agentes de transferencia

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 101(1) 2011, pp. 107–130 C© 2011 by Association of American GeographersInitial submission, November 2008; revised submission, February 2009; final acceptance, March 2009

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108 McCann

de polıtica individual en los desplazamientos de los modelos de polıticas, y deben tambien comprometerse enestudios cualitativos de grano fino sobre la manera como se mueven las polıticas de lugar en lugar, aprendidasen escenarios especıficos, y transformadas a medida que son movilizadas. La seccion final formula interrogantesteoricos y metodologicos y consideraciones que pueden ayudar a enmarcar investigaciones futuras alrededor delcomo, por que y con que consecuencias se movilizan globalmente las polıticas urbanas. Palabras clave: geografıasdel conocimiento, globalizacion, transferencia de polıticas, polıtica urbana, movilidades de polıtica urbana.

In 2003, Vancouver, British Columbia, architectBing Thom was hired by the Tarrant County,Texas, Water District to design the Trinity Point

Plan, a development and flood control project for river-side land on the edge of downtown Fort Worth (Thomn.d.). The plan’s defining features are the creation ofa new channel in the Trinity River, which will con-trol floodwaters and thus open 500 acres of floodplainto new development, and an emphasis on residentialdensity, much of it in apartment blocks, mixed-use zon-ing, environmentally conscious design elements, andwaterfront walking paths. The plan was the down-town element of a larger federal and local effort tomanage the Trinity River watershed. From the begin-ning, Fort Worth’s planners were keen to emulate thegood planning strategies they saw in waterfront rede-velopment in other parts of North America. Down-town business interests were also receptive because theyhoped to replicate the success of waterfront real es-tate development in San Antonio (Richardson 2002).Therefore, the existing institutional context in FortWorth made hiring someone like Thom likely from thebeginning.

Thom, for his part, reflected the need for consultantsto tailor their proposals to the locality in which theyare hired when he argued that his design was “uniquelyFort Worth” (quoted in Schnurman 2004, 1F). Yet,the architect also underscored urban planning and de-sign consultants’ tendencies to transfer “best practices”from elsewhere by noting that his Fort Worth designwould be directly inspired by the compact, residentialdowntown planning that has recently made Vancouverfamous in global planning and design circles (City ofVancouver 1997; Punter 2003). Vancouver’s model isdefined by “Living First” and “Sustainability” principlesthat have produced a downtown core with one of thehighest residential densities and some of the highesthousing prices in North America. The model empha-sizes bike and walking paths, a water orientation, andmixed-use zoning and design intended to maintain at-tractive, lively streets. Fort Worth’s decision makerssaw this landscape firsthand when Thom’s firm orga-nized a fact-finding visit to Vancouver. Such visits arecrucial for the learning process of potential clients. In-deed, to a Texas politician who participated in the trip,

Vancouver “had to be the model” for Fort Worth (inSchnurman 2004, 1F).

This back-and-forth teaching and learning processclearly had implications for Fort Worth. The benefitson the Vancouver side did not only accrue to the ar-chitectural firm, however. The wider political benefitsof favorable attention from elsewhere are evident, forexample, to the Vancouver Sun’s (“Lone star inspira-tion” 2004a, I1) real estate column, which noted that“[t]he civic worthies of Fort Worth, Tex. have turnedto Vancouver, via Thom, for inspiration in their goal ofimproving the city’s quality of life.” Vancouver’s imageas an international inspiration for seekers of good de-velopment policy is a powerful political narrative thatvalorizes existing development models in the city, legit-imates the actions of Vancouver’s development coali-tion, and dampens criticism of the negative impactsof the current policy—such as the city’s high hous-ing prices and attendant unaffordability for the poorand middle class (Blomley 2004; Boddy 2006; Eby andMisura 2006; Gurstein and Rotberg 2006; Kane 2007).

This example of the Vancouver–Fort Worth con-nection highlights both the translocal activities ofarchitects (Olds 1997, 2001; McNeill 2009) and the im-portance of the intercity, cross-scale circulation of pol-icy knowledge in the production of urban developmentstrategies and “restless” urban landscapes (Knox 1991).It also underscores the role of private consultants, ofwhich architects are only one type, in shaping flows ofknowledge about urban policy and in transferring poli-cies themselves. These are long-standing but increas-ingly important aspects of the production of cities, yetthey have not been adequately studied or theorized.

In focusing little on the specific processes and prac-tices just described, urban scholars in various disciplineshave become increasingly concerned, in more generalterms, with how cities are produced in and throughcross-scale relationships—by flows of people, capital,ideas, and so on (Harvey 1982, 1985; Massey 1991,1993, 2005, 2007; Castells 2000; Graham and Marvin2001; Smith 2001; Sassen 2002; Taylor 2007). A greatdeal of this work recognizes that flows are not unmooredfrom localities, regions, and territories. Rather, im-portant geographical literatures on scale, place, globalcities, neoliberalization, and urban development have


Urban Policy Mobilities and Global Circuits of Knowledge 109

grappled with the complex and mutually constitutiverelationships between urbanization and processes thatoperate through and beyond cities, interconnectingthem with other scales (Marston 2000; Brenner andTheodore 2002b; Wilson 2004; Hackworth 2006).

Two foundational insights underpinning these geo-graphical literatures, alongside their adherence to so-cial constructionist understandings of space (Lefebvre1991), are Harvey’s (1982, 1985) notion of the produc-tive tension between the fixity and mobility of capitaland Massey’s (1991, 1993) global-relational concep-tualization of place. The former highlights the twinimperatives of capital—to circulate and to be fixed inplace—and shows that this tension, and the seesaw-ing bouts of investment and disinvestment in the ur-ban landscape that accompany it, produces cities asdynamic sociospatial formations. The latter emphasizesthat cities must be understood as relational nodes, con-stituted by the flows of capital, immigrants, information,and so on, that tie them to other distant places. Place is,in this conception, an “event . . . the coming togetherof the previously unrelated, a constellation of processesrather than a thing . . . open and . . . internally multiple”(Massey 2005, 141).

These key insights and literatures on scaled and re-lational places notwithstanding, the proliferation ofscholarship on the urbanization–globalization nexus hasnot fully answered questions about the character andimplications of relationships between contemporary ur-banism and processes extending through and beyondcities. On the contrary, recent discussions of neolib-eralization, for example, suggest the need for researchthat adds empirical depth and theoretical nuance toour understanding of the “actually existing” forms ofcontemporary urban political economies (Brenner andTheodore 2002a; Peck and Tickell 2002; Larner 2003).Specifically, the global circulation of urban policies (for-mally drafted and adopted guidelines and proceduressetting out the long-term purposes of and addressing spe-cific problems of governance), policy models (more gen-eral statements of ideal policies, combining elements ofmore than one policy, or statements of ideal combi-nations of policies), and policy knowledge (expertiseor experienced-based know-how about policies, policy-making, implementation, and best practices) prolifer-ates and, therefore, needs continued research, as recentwriting on “policies in motion” (Peck 2003; Ward 2006)and “inter-local policy transfer” (Theodore and Peck2000; Peck and Theodore 2001) suggests. Research intothe processes, agents, and institutions involved in mo-bilizing certain “hot” policy ideas—about the best wayto build a “livable” and profitable downtown water-

front, for example—offers clear opportunities to furtherconceptualize and empirically detail our understand-ing of contemporary urbanization by tacking back andforth between specificity and generality, relationalityand territoriality (Peck and Tickell 2002; Wilson 2004;Proudfoot and McCann 2008; McCann and Ward 2010forthcoming).

I outline a framework for studying the characterand implications of urban policy mobilities—sociallyproduced and circulated forms of knowledge address-ing how to design and govern cities that developin, are conditioned by, travel through, connect, andshape various spatial scales, networks, policy communi-ties, and institutional contexts. My conceptual startingpoint is to take seriously the fixity–mobility dialectic tounderstand policy transfer not in terms of the volun-taristic acts of unconstrained, rational transfer agentsfreely “scanning” the world for objectively best prac-tices and not by focusing on and fetishizing policiesas naturally mobile objects. Rather, the circulation ofpolicy knowledge is paradoxically structured by embed-ded institutional legacies and imperatives (e.g., by long-standing policy paradigms, path dependencies, ideolo-gies, and frames of reference or by external forces, likepolitical-economic restructuring, which often necessi-tate the easiest, fastest, and most politically feasibletransfers). These contexts condition the field of pol-icy transfer as social, relational, and power laden (Peckand Theodore 2008). Thus, the “demand side” of policytransfer and the conditions under which adopters of bestpractices—such as the federal agencies, local planners,and downtown business interests who hired Thom to“Vancouverize” Fort Worth—operate must be acknowl-edged in combination with the study of the practices of“supply side” policy mediators, such as consultants.

Having taken this position, my specific purpose isto (1) elucidate the connective tissue that constitutescities as global-relational nodes; the representational,comparative, translatory, pedagogical, and ambulatorypractices through which contemporary policy expertsand consultants, city officials, academics, activists, andother urban actors position themselves and their citieswithin wider fields of interurban competition, cooper-ation, and learning1; and (2) conceptualize the role ofurban policy mobilities and global circuits of knowl-edge in providing pathways for the transfer of urbanpolicy models and in shaping contemporary urbanismand urbanization. The article is motivated by Peck andTickell’s (2002) call to “walk the line” between lo-cal specificity and an attention to global interconnec-tion, by Peck’s (2003, 229) related argument for moredetailed conceptualizations and “descriptions of the


110 McCann

circulatory systems that connect and interpenetrate ‘lo-cal’ policy regimes,” and by Larner’s (2003, 511) atten-tion to the “apparently mundane practices,” agents, andexperts through which the global is produced.

The article’s next section describes the dominantsocial science literature on policy transfer, one devel-oped by scholars in political science, and critiques it forits lack of full attention to the sociospatial and scalarelements of these transfers. The subsequent section ad-dresses this critique by proposing a conceptual frame-work that builds on certain elements of the “traditional”policy transfer literature but bolsters it through theintroduction of insights from both the burgeoning lit-erature on mobilities and also from poststructuralist ap-proaches to government. The point is not to paper overthe distinctions between the political economy andpoststructuralist approaches but to acknowledge theirdifferences and limits while drawing out their comple-mentary strengths when deployed in a specific context(Larner and Le Heron 2002a; Le Heron 2007; Lewis,Larner, and Le Heron 2008). This conceptual ground-clearing leads to the case of Vancouver, which I useto outline a perspective on urban policy mobilities thatfocuses on the transfer agents involved, the specificallyintercity, rather than international, travels of policymodels, and the sites in which policies are transferred.Urban development policy, as it is mobilized in andthrough Vancouver is, then, a lens through which toexplore how urban policy gets done in global context—through the prosaic routines, practices, technologies,interpersonal connections, and travels of key actors,who Stone (2004) referred to as “transfer agents.” Thisapproach emphasizes the situated nature of all globalflows, allowing a detailed investigation of how theyare performed in and through specific places, or mi-crospaces, while also attending to their more generalinfluence (Burawoy et al. 2000; Larner and Le Heron2002a, 2002b; McCann 2008; McCann and Ward forth-coming). Having illustrated how a situated, relationalconceptualization of urban policy mobilities and globalcircuits of knowledge might usefully inform the studyof urbanization, the article’s final section outlines a re-search agenda built on a number of theoretical andmethodological questions and considerations that stemfrom the previous discussion.

Policy Transfer

In analyzing the global travels of policies and thecirculation of policy knowledge, it is necessary to en-gage with the contemporary political science litera-

ture on policy transfer. The term policy transfer is, asStone (1999) noted, an umbrella concept referring tothe practices of national policymaking elites who “im-port innovatory policy developed elsewhere in the be-lief that it will be similarly successful in a differentcontext” (52)2 but also to the involuntary adoptionof new policies as the result of external pressures fromsupranational institutions like the International Mon-etary Fund (Dolowitz and Marsh 1996; Stone 2000; cf.Gilbert 2002) and to structural convergences and diffu-sions (R. Rose 1993) in the policy realm in which elitesplay less of an initiatory role. Although the diversity ofprocesses to which policy transfer refers suggests that it isa “chaotic conception” in Sayer’s (1992) sense, the termhas, nonetheless, spawned a significant literature thatseeks to model or theorize how the transfer process oper-ates, create typologies of the actors and institutions in-volved in transfers, identify the power relations throughwhich adoption occurs, and specify the conditions andmechanisms under which certain policy transfers suc-ceed or fail (Bennett 1991, 1997; Robertson 1991; R.Rose 1991, 1993; Wolman 1992; Dolowitz and Marsh1996, 2000; Stone 1996, 1999, 2000, 2004; Evans andDavies 1999; Dolowitz 2000, 2001, 2003; Radaelli 2000;Wolman and Page 2000, 2002; James and Lodge 2003;Evans 2004; Jones and Newburn 2007).

In developing their influential model of these pro-cesses, Dolowitz and Marsh (2000, 8) addressed the fol-lowing guiding questions:

Why do actors engage in policy transfer? Who are thekey actors involved in the policy transfer process? What istransferred? From where are lessons drawn? What are thedifferent degrees of transfer? What restricts or facilitatesthe policy transfer process? . . . How is the process of policytransfer related to policy “success” or policy “failure”?

This approach has, then, shed light on a numberof key elements of policy transfer. Yet, the utility ofthis traditional approach to transfer needs to be con-sidered critically from three angles. First, a reading ofthis literature highlights the care needed when concep-tualizing the identities and activities of transfer agents.Those studying policy transfer expend considerable ef-fort on identifying and categorizing these agents. The“Dolowitz and Marsh model” (2000, 10), for example,lists “nine main categories of political actors engagedin the policy transfer process: elected officials, politi-cal parties, bureaucrats/civil servants, pressure groups,policy entrepreneurs and experts, transnational corpo-rations, think tanks, supra-national governmental andnongovernmental institutions and consultants.” Stone



(2004, 556) also typologized a set of key agents: “Think-tanks or research institutes, consultancy firms, philan-thropic foundations, university centres, scientific asso-ciations, professional societies, training institutes andso forth.” The issue here is the balance between theempirical description of transfer agents and the analy-sis of process and practice. Peck and Theodore (2001,429) emphasized “processes of policy learning, emula-tion, and making” (see Peck 2006; Ward 2006; Cook2008) that define contemporary policy and, certainly,Dolowitz and Marsh (2000, 7) critiqued other studiesthat “describe the transfer of ideas or policies betweencountries but do not analyze and explain the processesinvolved.” Nonetheless, a focus on typologies of actors,and on models and definitions of what is or is not policytransfer, allows the typologies and models themselves tobe reified, becoming the objects of debate rather thanfacilitating analyses of the social processes that con-stitute policy transfer (Evans and Davies 1999; Jamesand Lodge 2003). Yet, it is clear that the identificationand categorization of actors is a necessary componentof studying the fundamentally social process of knowl-edge circulation in general and policy mobilities morespecifically.

A second critique of the traditional approach totransfer is related to its tendency to focus on thenational scale (Hoyt [2006] is an exception). Thenational scale limitation is clear in Dolowitz andMarsh’s (2000) references to “countries” and “‘foreign’models” that belie a particular conceptualization ofthe institutional geography of policy transfer—onethat elides the various sites and scales, including theurban, in and through which policies are produced. Anational approach fails to recognize that “cities . . . havebecome increasingly important geographical targetsand institutional laboratories” (Brenner and Theodore2002a, 21, italics added) for numerous policy exper-iments and that “as extra-local policy learning andemulation is normalized . . . the effectiveness of policiesand programmes remains stubbornly dependent onlocal economic and institutional conditions” (Peck andTheodore 2001, 427). Stone (1999, 53) acknowledgedthe important, if understudied, occurrence of transfer“at the sub-national level: between states in federalsystems and across local governments, municipalitiesand boroughs.” Yet, both she and Dolowitz and Marsh(1996, 352) only went so far as to acknowledgethat interlocal transfers and learning can happenwithin one national system. Thus, the policy transferliterature maintains a problematic separation betweenthe domestic and the international, which does not

acknowledge that urban policy actors can act globallyin their own right, particularly in a contemporarycontext where “state territorial organization . . . [hasbeen turned] inside-out insofar as its . . . goal is toenhance and promote the global competitiveness of itscities and regions” (Brenner 1998, 16).

A third concern is with the traditional notion of“transfer” itself. As Peck and Theodore (2001, 449) ar-gued, the term entails an “implicit literalism . . . whichtends to suggest the importation of fully formed, off-the-shelf policies, when in fact the nature of this pro-cess is much more complex, selective, and multilateral.”Policies, models, and ideas are not moved around likegifts at a birthday party or like jars on shelves, where themobilization does not change the character and contentof the mobilized objects. Although not all policy trans-fer literature falls entirely into this literalist trap—Stone(1999, 57) noted, for example, that “the process of mod-ification in transfer requires closer investigation”—it isimportant to further detail and conceptualize how “theform and function of . . . policies is prone to change asthey are translated and re-embedded within and be-tween different institutional, economic and politicalcontexts (at the local and national scales)” (Peck andTheodore 2001, 427).

From Policy Transfer to Urban PolicyMobilities

My argument so far has been that certain charac-teristics of the policy transfer approach—its tendencytoward narrow typologies, its adherence to one or twoscales, and its tendency to fall into a literalist trap of as-suming that little happens to policies “along the way,” or“in the telling” as they are moved from place to place—limit its utility in the study of how cities are constitutedas key sociospatial nodes within global circuits of pol-icy knowledge. In this regard, it is necessary to drawon the useful insights of the traditional literature butto incorporate other conceptual vocabularies and per-spectives so as to remain open to the array of agents,practices, processes, socially produced (and productive)scales and territories in and through which cities areproduced. Some of those working in the policy transfertradition, as well as geographers and others, have begunto push the limits of the traditional approach (Wolman1992; Gaffikin and Warf 1993; Stone 1999; Theodoreand Peck 2000; Wolman and Page 2000, 2002; Peckand Theodore 2001; Peck 2003, 2006; McCann 2004,2008; Hoyt 2006; Ward 2006; Cook 2008). I suggest


112 McCann

that more can be done, however, by identifying ele-ments of an alternative approach that can be found inthe contemporary literature on mobilities and in post-structuralist scholarship on the seemingly banal prac-tices of institutional actors.

Numerous authors have sketched the contours ofa recent “mobilities turn” in the social sciences(Urry 2000a, 2000b, 2004, 2007; Cresswell 2001,2006; Heyman and Cunningham 2004; Sheller 2004;Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006; Sheller and Urry2006) and begun to critique certain aspects of it (Ray2002; Adey 2006; Binnie et al. 2007). The mobilitiesapproach focuses on, among other things, the variousways in which humans are mobile, how people mobi-lize various objects, how technologies—whether mo-bile themselves or fixed in place (“moored”)—facilitatemovement, and on the stratification of mobility, iden-tifying distinctions between “kinetic elites” (Wood andGraham, quoted in Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006, 6)and other less mobile groups, the relationship betweenmobility and social exclusion and inclusion (Urry 2002;Cass, Shove, and Urry 2005), and “how [the concept of]mobilities enables/disables/modifies gendered practices”(Uteng and Cresswell 2008, 1). These programmaticand conceptual statements have inspired applicationsof the notion of mobility or mobilities to a wide rangeof topics, especially automobile travel and its asso-ciated infrastructures and cultures (Sheller and Urry2000; Urry, Featherstone, and Thrift 2004; Hagman2006; Freund and Martin 2007; Laurier et al. 2008),air travel and airports (Cwerner 2006; Adey, Budd, andHubbard 2007; Adey 2008; Kellerman 2008), tourism,convention, business, and spiritual travel (Sheller andUrry 2004; Larsen, Urry, and Axhausen 2006; Bajc,Coleman, and Eade 2007; Edensor 2007), and migrationor transnationalism (Conradson and Latham 2005; Aliand Holden 2006; Conradson and McKay 2007). Al-though the range of applications can, on the one hand,be seen as an indication of its analytical merit, the con-cept of mobilities has, on the other hand, been argued tohave “become a most elusive theoretical, social, techni-cal, and political construct” (Uteng and Cresswell 2008,1) and might be accused of being a “chaotic conception”in its own right.

Nevertheless, I will show that mobilities, when em-ployed judiciously, offers a worthwhile analytical lensthrough which to study policies in motion. In generalterms, it

challenges the ways in which much social science researchhas been relatively “a-mobile” until recently . . . [and]

problematizes both “sedentarist” approaches in the so-cial sciences that treat place, stability, and dwelling asa natural steady-state, and “deterritorialized” approachesthat posit a new “grand narrative” of mobility, fluidityor liquidity as a pervasive condition of postmodernity orglobalization. . . . It is a part of a broader theoretical projectaimed at going beyond the imagery of “terrains” as spa-tially fixed geographical containers for social processes,and calling into question scalar logics such as local/globalas descriptors of regional extent. (Hannam, Sheller, andUrry 2006, 5)

This approach resonates with long-standing tradi-tions in geography, represented by the work of Harveyand of Massey, that emphasize the need to understandthe production of place in terms of fixity and mobility,relationality and territoriality. More specifically, andagain resonating with geographical literatures, the mo-bilities approach questions the tendency toward reifi-cation and national state-centeredness in much of thetraditional policy transfer literature. It offers a vision ofsociety (and policymaking) as a multiply scaled, emer-gent social process. Furthermore, mobilities provide anopportunity to think about the transfer, translation, ortransformation of policy models and ideas in terms ofthe embodied practices across what Ong (1999, 159)called “translocal fields of power.” Global circuits ofpolicy knowledge shape and are shaped by social con-nections made by actors sometimes at a distance—overe-mail or by reading policy documents about policiesin other places—but, as Urry (2004) emphasized, theseconnections also depend on the intermittent copres-ence of those actors in specific places (see also Larsen,Urry, and Axhausen 2006; Le Heron 2007).3

Although the mobilities literature offers useful addi-tions to the study of policy transfer, reference to otherliteratures allows a sharper perspective on urban policymobilities by offering insights into questions of knowl-edge. First, circuits of policy knowledge are composedof epistemic communities who transfer, emplace, andutilize certain forms of knowledge as part of their prac-tice. Economic geographers have a long-standing in-terest in questions of knowledge, learning, the global,and the local. Debates among these scholars continuearound the relative importance to economic compet-itiveness of locally embedded tacit systems of knowl-edge, developed by and unique to spatially proximateactors and institutions in specific “learning regions” or“clusters,” versus codified forms of knowledge that areaccessible to economic actors in most locations (Val-lance [2007] provides a clear review of this debate).They offer resources to conceptualize the transfers and



uses of policy knowledge, specifically with regard toattempts to complicate the tacit/local–codified/globaldualism (Amin and Cohendet 1999, 2004; Allen 2000;Grabher 2004) and, in ways that Vallance (2007) ar-gued parallel the mobilities literature, to emphasize howeconomic knowledge circulates by being carried by spe-cific actors and through processes of translation andteaching (French 2000; Bunnell and Coe 2001; Coeand Bunnell 2003; Thrift and Olds 2005).4 Central tothis and other literatures in contemporary geographyand urban studies is the network metaphor. Certainly,global epistemic communities are networked and anal-yses that deploy the network as an analytical heuristichave contributed a great deal to scholarship on power,space, and the global. Space does not permit a reviewof this approach here, as I am more concerned withtheorizing exactly how knowledge is mobilized in andthrough territories, places, scales, and networks, with-out privileging any one of these dimensions (Jessop,Brenner, and Jones 2008).

A second addition to the mobilities approach in-volves work by political theorists on the character ofknowledge, expertise, and governmental rationalities,on the ways in which certain ideas become hegemonicand global in contemporary society and on the actors,practices, representations, and discourses that consti-tute knowledge and truth (N. Rose and Miller 1992;Dean 1999; N. Rose 1999; Griggs and Howarth 2002;McLennan 2004; Osborne, 2004). Some specifically ge-ographical work on cities and localities, particularlyconcerning various rationalities and technologies ofgovernment, has stemmed from this wider literature(Raco and Imrie 2000; Huxley 2002, 2006), but morecan be done in applying its insights to questions of con-temporary urban policy transfer. The most convincingcombination of the insights and concerns stemmingfrom the types of economic geography and political the-ory discussed here has been developed by Larner and hercollaborators (Larner 2002; Larner and Le Heron 2002a,2002b, 2004; Larner and Walters 2004; Le Heron 2007;Lewis, Larner, and Le Heron 2008). Although this workdoes not have an urban focus, it is particularly useful formy purposes because it pays attention to the relation-ship among micropractices, microspaces, and globaliza-tion. Therefore, in what follows, I frame a discussionof urban policy mobilities in terms of a combinationof the work of mobilities scholars and what Larner andLe Heron (2002a, 418) referred to as “post-structuralpolitical economies” involving “[s]ituated theorizationand method” (see also Burawoy et al. 2000; Herbert2000).

A City in the World: Policy Mobilities inand Through Vancouver

The merits of the approach just outlined can bestbe explored through an empirical case study. Here Iuse aspects of Vancouver’s relationship to global cir-cuits of policy knowledge to illustrate my argument.The discussion is based on an ongoing research projectthat analyzes two fields of urban policy in Vancou-ver that have clear global relations: development andplanning policy and drug policy. In the interests ofclarity, I only discuss development and planning here(but see McCann 2008). The research employs dis-course analysis of a wide range of documents includ-ing government documents, newspapers, professionalpublications, Web pages, podcasts, videos, and blogs;interviews with key transfer agents involved in mobi-lizing policies; and ethnographic observation of varioussettings where transfer occurs or is facilitated, includ-ing public meetings, conferences, site visits, seminars,and lectures. The discussion represents an embryonicattempt to develop a “global ethnography” of policytransfer that investigates the processes, meanings, andcontexts of a single research site, and the governmen-tality of certain microspaces within it, to investigate themutually constitutive relationships, forces, and imagi-naries that tie it to other scales (Burawoy 2000; Her-bert 2000; Larner and Le Heron 2002a, 2002b; Lewis,Larner, and Le Heron 2008).5

Who Mobilizes Policy?

I have suggested that care needs to be taken whenidentifying important policy transfer agents becausethere is a danger of calcifying discussion into typolo-gies that hinder rather than facilitate analysis of so-cial processes. Yet, the need to understand and iden-tify who mobilizes policy is crucial precisely becausemobilities are social processes. This tension is evi-dent in the way in which the practice and process-oriented literatures discussed in the previous sectionoften parallel the policy transfer literature in producingtypologies of key actors. N. Rose and Miller’s (1992,181) influential statement on governmentality arguedthat, “[government relies on] designs put forward byphilosophers, political economists, physiocrats and phi-lanthropists, government reports, committees of in-quiry, White Papers, proposals and counterproposalsby organizations of business, labour, finance, charitiesand professionals.” Developing a similar perspective,Larner (2002, 663) specified a set of experts involved


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in the production of contemporary globalism. Theyare a “new specialist elite.” “They range from interna-tional management consultants to small self-employedentrepreneurs, . . . conference organizers, people in mar-keting, public relations and software development.”

Policy mobilities are simultaneously fixed in and mo-bilized through communities of social actors and theirassociated institutions, such as those described by Roseand Larner. Who might these communities of pol-icy mobilizers be in the urban development context,specifically? I identify three broad categories: local pol-icy actors, the global policy consultocracy, and infor-mational infrastructures. The broad category of localpolicy actors includes policy professionals, like urbanplanners, working within the state; private policy con-sultants providing services to the state; and civil soci-ety groups, including political activists and nonprofits.6

Each works in its own way as a “policy entrepreneur”(Mintrom 1997), searching globally for best practicesto embrace, “cutting-edge” cities to emulate, and “hot”experts from whom to learn but, as discussed earlier, al-ways within externally, historically, and institutionallyimposed constraints (Peck and Theodore 2008). Theytap into and utilize extralocal connections—rangingfrom official intergovernmental alliances to individualrelationships with colleagues elsewhere—to learn aboutpolicy models and physically bring experts to the cityto inform locals about cutting-edge policies.

In seeking to create connections through policy net-works and to mobilize policies from one place to an-other, local policy actors engage with what might becalled, following Saint-Martin (2000), the “global con-sultocracy.” This collection of individuals, firms, andthink tanks can be divided into two groups: incom-ing policy consultants—those who come to a city fromelsewhere to impart knowledge—and outgoing policyconsultants who, like Bing Thom, are based in one cityand present stories of its successes to people elsewhereas part of their professional practice. The mobility ofthese consultants and their tendency to gather infor-mation on best practices from various places to bolstertheir own specific recommendations makes them partic-ularly powerful conduits of information among far-flungand, in many cases, quite different cities.

Policy mobilities are also facilitated by a range of in-formational infrastructures—individuals, institutions,organizations, and technologies that interpret, frame,package, and represent information about best pol-icy practices, successful cities, and cutting-edge ideas.Specifically, we can identify three distinct but relatedgroups: educators and trainers, professional organiza-

tions and supralocal policy organizations, and the pop-ular media. Educators and trainers frame knowledgeabout policy practice by formally educating new gen-erations of policy actors in universities and collegesand by engaging in midcareer professional developmenttraining. They codify information about various policymodels and about the cities in which they have beenimplemented, turning the attention of their studentstoward certain urban development paradigms and theirassociated cities. By conferring degrees and diplomas,these educational institutions also credentialize and le-gitimate particular forms of urban policy expertise andtheir related mental maps of good and bad examples ofpolicy (McCann 2004, 2008). The research of singleor small groups of academics can have a similar effect,of course, as it can highlight and perhaps legitimatecertain mobilities and mental maps.

The professional organizations with which policy ac-tors interact are also involved in the framing and dis-semination of expert policy knowledge through theirawards, conferences, workshops, field trips, professionalpublications, Web sites, and e-mail lists (e.g., AmericanPlanning Association n.d.; Canadian Institute of Plan-ners n.d.). The locations these organizations choose fortheir conferences and the plenary speakers they inviteare also significant in that they serve to anoint certaincities and certain policies as worthy of attention. Asimilar informational role can be seen in the work ofsupralocal policy organizations, such as the United Na-tions Human Settlements Programme, “UN Habitat.”These organizations perform clearinghouse functionsnot dissimilar to, but somewhat differently directedthan, national professional organizations. Like profes-sional organizations, they confer legitimacy on certainmodels and certain cities through reports, awards, anddecisions about where to hold conferences (UN Habi-tat n.d.-c). The popular media, as a third informationalinfrastructure, play a similar role in the framing of urbanpolicy. They construct narratives and mental maps ofgood and bad policies, cities, and neighborhoods andrepeat and popularize the findings of the experts andorganizations already discussed (McCann 2004).

In identifying these agents of urban policy transfer, Ibuild on, but also extend, the range of actors proposedby the traditional policy transfer literature. In doing so,I indicate that their activities and the global-relationalgeographies they construct are often manifest beyondthe traditional bounds of the state, although never en-tirely divorced from its institutions. Furthermore, asthese actors create, maintain, and utilize the “fragile re-lays, contested locales, and fissiparous affiliations” (N.



Rose 1999, 51) that facilitate policy mobilities, theyhighlight an important geography of intercity circuitsof knowledge that do not necessarily match the pathsof international transfers.

Intercity Policy Mobilities

In their discussion of the mobilities perspective,Hannam, Sheller, and Urry (2006) agreed withBrenner’s (2004, 66) argument that “the image ofpolitical-economic space as a complex, tangled mo-saic of superimposed and interpenetrating nodes, levels,scales, and morphologies has become more appropriatethan the traditional Cartesian model of homogeneous,self-enclosed and contiguous blocks of territory that haslong been used to describe the modern interstate sys-tem.” For them, “the nation itself is being transformedby [various] mobilities, as is the city” (Hannam, Sheller,and Urry 2006, 2). Interurban mobilities, linking citieswithin the same nation state (Stone 2004) but alsoconnecting cities in different countries, are producedthrough the activities of policy transfer agents. Theseconnections work in and through national state insti-tutions when, for example, they organize and financeinternational policy conferences like the World UrbanForum (see later) or when embassy staff help facilitatethe insertion of “their” architects, planners, construc-tion companies, and so on into other countries, as theCanadian embassy has done in the United Arab Emi-rates (Lowry and McCann 2009). Crucially, as this arti-cle suggests, these connections also operate outside andaround national state frameworks.

Intercity interaction beyond the formal structures ofthe national state but still influenced by national statecontexts is evident in the case of Seattle’s recent down-town planning process. In 2005, that city hired RaySpaxman, a former Vancouver planning director, andLarry Beasley, who at the time was Vancouver’s codi-rector of planning, to evaluate a proposal that recom-mended changes in downtown development patterns(Spaxman and Beasley 2005; see Bermingham 2005;Langston 2005a, 2005b). Spaxman and Beasley drewon their Vancouver experience by arguing for increaseddensity in Seattle’s core. In their report, they also explic-itly addressed the similarities and differences betweenthe two cities. The first sentence of the report reads:“Seattle and Vancouver are neighbours and our citi-zens admire much of what they see in each other’s city”(Spaxman and Beasley 2005, 1). The report goes onto set the terms for their intercity perspective by iden-tifying a degree of commensurability that allows the

two cities to be considered benchmarks for each other:“Vancouver and Seattle are kindred cities and we havemuch to learn from one another. We are good neigh-bours seeking a good life. We share a similar climate,a similar sized urban conglomeration and the same en-vironmentally sensitive Georgian Basin in the PacificNorthwest” (4).

Yet, the report does not only emphasize similaritiesand learning opportunities. It also addresses differencesbetween the two cities, in the context of differences be-tween Canada and the United States, again indicatingthe fine line consultants walk between local specificityand intercity comparison:

At the same time, we are also different. There are cul-tural, historic and legislative differences that need to beunderstood and respected. Our two countries, althoughsimilar in many ways, manifest divergent values and com-munity aspirations. Our two urban economies are at dif-ferent stages of development, and function in dissimilarways. We don’t want our cities to replicate one anotherbut we can positively influence one another. (Spaxmanand Beasley 2005, 4)

The report sparked debates in Seattle around thequestion of whether Vancouver’s policies could, orshould, be imported (Boddy 2005; Dawdy 2005).Although it is yet to be seen if the two downtownswill develop in parallel, the Vancouver consultants’ in-volvement has meant that the political discussion overthe value of residential density in downtown Seattlehas been set in terms of the Canadian city while, as inthe case of Fort Worth, ongoing discussions over, andadjustments to urban design policy in Vancouver are,to some extent, conducted in terms of the popularity ofthe Vancouver model in other cities.

These examples emphasize that an approach to pol-icy transfer that involves only the analysis of interlocaltransfer within a particular polity, or the analysis of in-ternational transfer among national states, suffers from alack of appreciation for how urban actors act globally interms of policy. An approach that starts from the notionof policy mobility as a social process enacted through theapparently banal practices of bureaucrats, consultants,and activists, will entail an attention to the represen-tational and comparative practices of these actors andto related questions of commensurability. It takes, afterall, a particular type of persuasive storytelling, involvingstrategic namings and framings, inserted into a specificcontext where actors are predisposed to a certain rangeof policy options, to convince actors in one city thattheir place is commensurate with another to the extent


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that policies formulated and implemented elsewheremight also work at home. Such an imaginary—a set ofmeanings, values, and institutions held in common andconstituting the worldview of a particular communityor society—is not natural, but, like any imaginary, it issocially produced. Thom, for example, needed to con-struct a particular persuasive narrative to convince hisTexan clients of the merits of looking to Vancouver fornew downtown development ideas and, clearly, Spax-man and Beasley are at pains to tell just the right storywhen offering their Vancouver-inspired vision for thefuture of downtown Seattle. Their narratives are men-tal maps highlighting intercity connection and similar-ity and, like all maps, they represent the interests andintentions of their authors more than they offer a neu-tral window onto the “real” world (Harley 1992; Wood1992; Pickles 2004). Furthermore, like maps with theirconventions of orientation, shading, labeling, and soon, narratives of intercity connection and commensu-rability are legible, understandable, and persuasive toparticular audiences because they employ a set of tropesand representational techniques with which the audi-ence has prior comfort and familiarity. The audience—the institutionally embedded demand side—is alreadyconditioned to look for certain “institutional fixes” andtherefore respond to a particular narrative (Peck 2005;Peck and Theodore 2008)

For Larner and Le Heron (2002b, 762), this hege-monic imaginary is constituted by “an entire fam-ily of conceptually related comparative techniques”that “explicitly or implicitly involve the imaginingof comparisons across geographically discrete spacesand encourage social relations to be performed inthe same way in different locations” (Larner and LeHeron 2002b, 763). Their analysis centers on bench-marking as a particularly powerful and increasinglyprevalent form of calculation that employs carefullyconstructed indexes and other numerical measuresto identify quantifiable differences and similaritiesamong places. Such calculative and quantitative tech-niques permit, among other things, the disembeddingof specific characteristics from unique places and theconstruction of a matrix of abstract measures andequivalences that “makes the ‘incommensurable com-mensurable”’ (761) and makes “it possible to thinkof organizationally discrete and spatially disparate ob-jects as comparable” (Larner and Le Heron 2004,214).

To Larner and Le Heron (2002b, 762), benchmark-ing is an increasingly prevalent activity beyond the busi-ness world. “[P]oliticians, academics and community

organizations alike now ‘benchmark’ themselves in pur-suit of ‘best practice,”’ they argued. This translation ofthe incommensurable into the commensurable consti-tutes global spaces of emulation and competition, “newfields of competition made up of ‘best practice’ peersthat other individuals and organizations seek to emu-late” (Larner and Le Heron 2004, 215). Ward (2006),speaking specifically of urban policy, made a similarpoint when arguing that “[t]he ‘making-up’ of policyis . . . a profoundly geographical process, in and throughwhich different places are constructed as facing similarproblems in need of similar solutions” (70; N. Rose andMiller 1992).

The “narration” of a city as global—as similar andconnected to others in terms of policy—is, then, mate-rialized through the practices of consultants and other“experts of truth” (N. Rose 1999). For one Vancouverplanner whose professional reputation is closely tied tothe city’s development model, the point of travelingto other cities with the “Vancouver story” and of writ-ing about Vancouver’s model is to portray it correctlyand to influence wider discussions about the future ofurbanism.

I feel . . . an importance in the idea that the image of ourcity—out to the rest of the world—needs to be at leastan accurate image. And I like to tell the story to the restof the world. So I am . . . oriented to the, not the popularpress, I don’t feel too much anxiety about the popularpress . . . but the academic press, the people that are settingthe basic attitude of our practice here, planning practiceshere. I want to make sure that we contribute to that.And secondly I like the city to be a player among thosethat are making contributions that are defining urbanismas we know it today. And I like to think that the citythrough our example, and through what we have beenable to experiment with, failed and succeeded in, thosebecome good contributions toward the bigger debate anddiscussions going on about urbanism. (Interview, seniorplanner, Vancouver, September 2006)

The products of the work of experts like thisplanner—stories, articles, reports, PowerPoint presen-tations, maps, and so on—reflect, travel through, andproduce circuits of policy knowledge. Thus these com-parative technologies create their own spatialities,marked by the mobilization of knowledge through cer-tain networks and sites of persuasion and by the creationof specific spatial imaginaries, ways of seeing and act-ing in the world that “‘stabilise’ (become rationalities,metadiscourses, logics) as they are communicated insome way, discussed with others, and then instituted as



the basis for action and performance” (Larner and LeHeron 2002b, 760).

The prominence of Vancouver in the minds of policyactors in certain other cities is evident in an interviewwith a planner in Portland, Oregon. Discussion in theinterview turned to his knowledge of and interactionwith Vancouver’s planners as “fellow travelers,” deal-ing with what he understood as commensurate problemsand formulating solutions that he could see as transfer-able to his own city:

[If you are] looking for exchange or models or work for you,you probably want to go to a city that is doing something[similar]. So the reason that I was calling Vancouver mostrecently [was to say], “Hey we are going to hire somebodyfor our food program [as Vancouver had recently donewhen setting up the city’s Food Policy Council].” So wejust called up, or e-mailed up, and said, “How are you guysapproaching this, what are the work projects . . . ?” That’sreally what we are dealing with today and we want to hearfrom somebody else that is doing it. (Interview, planner inthe Office of Sustainable Development, Portland, Oregon,June 2005)

The comparative technologies and representationalpractices of various transfer agents position local policymodels in wider scalar contexts. As such, they constructurban policy mobilities that operate in and beyondtraditionally defined realms of policymaking, such aslocalities and nations. The most mundane practices—writing a policy report, phoning or e-mailing a colleaguein another city—are, therefore, very important to policymobilities as a social, interscalar process.

Something Happens Along the Way, in the Telling,and on Site

If, indeed, the mobilization of policy among citiesis to be understood as continually enacted, performed,and practiced, then it is necessary to escape the literalisttrap and to accept that the sociospatial process of cir-culating policy ideas shapes and reshapes policies. Thisassertion draws us to the microspaces of meeting roomsand other sites of persuasion (cf. Peet 2002) where ideasare conveyed, as I discuss later, but it also points to someof the key insights of the mobilities literature.

Mobility, for Cresswell (2001, 20), is a “meaningfuland power-laden geographical phenomenon” involving“the displacement of an object from A to B” (Cresswell2006, 4). He made a sharp analytical distinction be-tween mobility and movement, however. “Movementis the general fact of displacement before the type,strategies and social implications of that movement

are considered” (Cresswell 2001, 14). “In classic mi-gration theory,” he continued by way of example, “thechoice of whether or not to move would be the resultof so-called push and pull factors in A and B respec-tively. The content of the line between them wouldremain unexplored . . . [and] taken for granted” (Cress-well 2006, 2; see Sheller and Urry’s [2006, 212–13]similar critique of transport research). Approaches topolicy transfer that assume that policies are transferredfully formed fall into the literalist trap because theyunderstand transfer in abstract terms, as “desocialisedmovement” (Cresswell 2001, 14) rather than as a so-cial process operating through and constitutive of socialspace. They take the line for granted.

My purpose is to begin to unpack the lines of move-ment, the connective social tissue, that constitute urbanpolicy mobilities. Something happens to policy knowl-edge along the way, in the telling, and on site as policyactors learn from each other, from sites they visit, andfrom the various institutions and mediators they en-counter. We can apprehend elements of this processthrough the lens of mobility. I first focus on the ac-tivities, copresences, and learning opportunities thatemerge in the spaces of travel. I then highlight the mi-crospaces of persuasion that situate and inform policy-oriented travel and learning.

For Hannam, Sheller, and Urry (2006, 12–13), “thetime spent traveling is not dead time that people al-ways seek to minimize.” Rather than “distinguish[ing]travel from activities,” they emphasized “that activitiesoccur while on the move, that being on the move caninvolve sets of ‘occasioned’ activities.” These activitiescan be stimulating and interesting, they can be a sig-nificant part of the reason for traveling, and I suggestthat they characterize fact-finding trips, site visits, andconference attendance, among other types of “policytravel.” Policy travel provides a particular type of socialsetting and, ideally, a focused retreat-like context inwhich to share ideas and to engage with on-the-groundmanifestations of urban policy, such as the Vancouverlandscapes that were presented to delegations from FortWorth and Seattle. This particular type of travel is aform of “material and sociable dwelling-in-motion” inwhich airplane, car, and bus journeys and also walk-ing tours through urban developments represent placesof and for social learning activities. They can offer a“space of release” (Le Heron 2007, 35) where partici-pants can think with and beyond their standard refer-ence points and can involve “specific forms of talk, workor information-gathering, but [also] simply being con-nected, maintaining a moving presence with others that


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holds the potential for many different convergences ordivergences of physical presence” (Hannam, Sheller,and Urry 2006, 13).

One purpose of such fact-finding trips is, of course, toallow delegations to learn firsthand from their peers inother cities about the processes, challenges, and benefitsof the formulation and realization of particular policymodels.7 So policy knowledge is not only produced andperformed along the way, through conversations andcopresences, but something happens to policy modelsas they are told to delegations on site. Cities that be-come popular destinations for incoming delegations ofpolicy actors develop protocols and packaged narrativesfor dealing with their visitors in a way that is efficientfor the hosts and also edifying and enjoyable for theguests. In cities like Vancouver, stories of smart growthplanning and urban livability are well honed, as arethe strategies and logistics for telling them, includinghaving key figures “ready to go” on relatively short no-tice, knowing which stories and which tours are bestfor which delegations of “policy tourists” (Ward 2007),when to involve the mayor or senior staff, and howto evaluate the seriousness of various delegations (In-terviews with planners: Austin 2000; Portland 2005;Vancouver 2006; see McCann 2004).

A Vancouver planner emphasizes the importance ofsite visits, rather than simply learning at a distance,as he discusses his department’s approach to hostingvisiting delegations:

[T]he best thing that can happen to people is just letthem go experience it. I can interpret that for them, Imuch prefer to interpret after they’ve had the experiencethemselves. . . . I’ve found that when people go out andexperience the place, the richness of their experience isactually way more [compelling] than my stories. . . . Andthen, after they’ve seen it, they are really good at taking itwhere they want to take it. I tell them a bit of the story,give them some documents, but they then ask the ques-tions that really matter. The Americans ask one kind ofquestion. Europeans ask another kind of question. Peoplefrom Asian countries ask different questions. (Interview,senior planner, Vancouver, September 2006)

In turn, members of the delegations shape these nar-ratives and experiences as they retell them on their re-turn home. They are generally expected to return withcoherent stories to tell about what they learned, eitherin verbal form or in written reports.

Here again, I think we can turn some of the mobilitiesperspective on travel activities—those of tourists, forexample—to the task of conceptualizing policy travel.Hannam, Sheller, and Urry (2006, 15) noted that

“[m]uch travel and communication involves the activedevelopment and performances of ‘memory’ [involvingthe] active employment of photographs, postcards,letters, images, guides, souvenirs and objects.” Theysuggested that these images and objects are carried withpeople and used to “reassemble memories, practicesand even landscapes.” If these are the sorts of objectsgathered by migrants, tourists, and day-trippers, whatobjects might be carried by urban policy tourists, intenton reassembling their site visits for their own benefitand for that of their home audience? Photographs,video and audio recordings, maps, sketches, diagrams,plans, policy documents, brochures, PowerPoint pre-sentations (either in electronic form or in printed notespages), and, perhaps most important, word-of-mouthstories (Wolman 1992) are among the artifacts of thesite that are likely to accompany policy actors on tripshome. These sources are then assembled into a set of“actionable” ideas that, when deployed in other cities,can influence their development. Time spent travelingis alive with possibilities. Things happen along the way.The possibilities are not limitless, however. They arestructured by the local conditions and institutional con-texts in which the various transfer agents are embedded.

A second related contribution—and, again, onethat resonates strongly with long-standing traditionsof geographical thought dealing with mobility, fixity,global senses of place, and economic geographies ofknowledge—is the argument that mobilities operatethrough nodes and are predicated on the existenceof fixed infrastructures and sites. As Urry (2004, 28)put it, “all social life [involves] various kinds of con-nections sustained at a distance but with intermittentmeetings.” Mobilities, then, “involve occasioned, inter-mittent face-to-face conversations and meetings withincertain places at certain moments that seem obliga-tory for the sustaining of families, friendship, work-groups, businesses and leisure organizations” (Hannam,Sheller, and Urry 2006, 14–15; cf. Amin and Cohendet1999, 2004; Grabher 2004; Vallance 2007, on “rela-tional proximities” and “swift trust” and “ephemeralties” in economic geographies of knowledge). In thecontext of policy mobilities, these sites of copresence,learning, and persuasion include the spaces of fact-finding trips. Clearly, they also involve the spaces ofconferences and similar meetings. The meeting rooms,hallways, cafes, bars, and restaurants of conferences arewhat Larner and Le Heron (2002b, 765) termed “global-izing ‘microspaces’ ” where expertise about globally sig-nificant best practice is deployed and discussed, wherelessons are learned, where trust is developed, where



reputations are made or unmade (reputations of bestcities, successful policies, and hot policy gurus), andwhere acquaintances, or “weak ties,” are made amongcopresent conferees, thus connecting what would oth-erwise be socially and spatially isolated policy commu-nities (Granovetter 1983). Mobile policies are, then,shaped and given momentum in the telling of storiesduring meetings.

Ward has noted the importance of meetings, semi-nars, symposia, workshops, and conferences for the mo-bilization of the business improvement district (BID)model into the United Kingdom. He noted the way thatBritish trade and government organizations organizedthese sorts of events in conjunction with the roll-out ofearly pilot BID schemes. “Over 100 local governmentofficers and business representatives attended these [na-tional seminars]. Local meetings were also held in the22 pilots, at which more detailed concerns over localspecifics were discussed. At both types of meetings del-egates learnt about BIDs, often through listening aboutUS case studies” (Ward 2006, 66–67). These meetingshad profound impacts. By attending them, “local publicsector officials in a range of UK towns and cities be-gan the process of learning. Existing subjectivities andrationalities were remade in and through these events,and through the subject-making exercises the state as apeopled set of institutions begun to be restructured alongneoliberal lines” (67). As this example suggests, and as Ihave already argued with reference to informational in-frastructures like professional organizations, decisionsabout how and where to hold meetings are strategic,offering benefits to the organizing institutions, the at-tendees, and the local hosts.

Take, for example, the Third World Urban Forum(WUF III), coordinated by UN Habitat and held inVancouver in June 2006. Funded primarily by UNHabitat and the Canadian Government, WUF III wasintended to support Habitat’s mission “to promote so-cially and environmentally sustainable towns and citieswith the goal of providing adequate shelter for all”(UN Habitat n.d.-b). The organization engages in anumber of activities around this goal and, since 1997,has had an explicit focus on policy transfer throughits Best Practices and Local Leadership Programme,which focuses on “identifying, disseminating and ap-plying lessons learned from Best Practices to ongoingtraining, leadership and policy development activities”through “documented and peer-reviewed best practices,examples of good policies and enabling legislation, casestudies and briefs and transfer methodologies” (UNHabitat n.d.-a). UN Habitat has positioned itself as

a key global informational infrastructure that mediatesurban policy mobilities and constructs global spaces ofcomparison and commensurability.

WUF III attracted over 9,600 delegates from onehundred countries to Vancouver. It was dominated bygovernments (31 percent of delegates, 16 percent ofwhich were from local authorities), nongovernmentalorganizations (NGOs; 23 percent), professional and re-search organizations (15 percent), and the private sec-tor (12 percent; UN Habitat 2006a, 7) and involvedfive days of meetings, including traditional plenaries,round tables, and paper sessions, and also more than 160“networking events,” intended to provide “an oppor-tunity to . . . build knowledge, strengthen partnershipsand share ideas and best practices” (UN Habitat 2006a,11–12). The event was clearly perceived by its orga-nizers to be the sort of node, or globalized microspace,where best practice peers could understand and build ontheir commensurate problems and experiences. As theofficial post-Forum summary puts it, “[p]articipants werekeen to share ideas, network and forge new alliancesthrough both formal and informal meetings with part-ners, and viewed the Forum not as a place where dec-larations and plans of action were endorsed but whereexperiences were shared” (UN Habitat 2006a, 7).

There were at least two reasons why Vancouver waschosen to host WUF III. First, the Forum commemo-rated the first UN Habitat conference, held in Vancou-ver in 1976—an event that produced the VancouverDeclaration, still a key text for the organization (UNHabitat 1976). Second, as suggested earlier, organiza-tions like UN Habitat choose the sites of their meetingscarefully with reference to the connections betweentheir agendas and the characteristics of host cities. Van-couver’s reputation dovetailed with UN Habitat’s focuson urban sustainability. As the program outline doc-ument argued, “[a] leader in sustainable urbanization,Vancouver . . . is widely considered one of the world’smost livable cities” (UN Habitat 2006c, 8). This script-ing of the city was reinforced by Habitat’s executivedirector:

Canada and the city of Vancouver have a consistent recordas a wellspring of novel ideas for sustainable urbanization.They are therefore, the most appropriate choice for theThird Session of the World Urban Forum to generatenew ideas and actions in support of our common questfor more just, inclusive and environmentally sound cities.(Tibaijuka, in UN Habitat 2006b, 2)

The high hopes of the organizers seemed to be con-firmed by the end of the conference. Delegates agreed,


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the official summary argues, “that risk-taking and thepursuit of innovation must characterize municipal lead-ership if cities are to achieve sustainable development.Vancouver’s example in taking the lead in such areasas air and water quality, public transit and planningwas mentioned often in this context” (UN Habitat2006a, 5).

Within Vancouver’s policy and political circles,WUF III was welcomed for many reasons. It was, ofcourse, a chance for local policy actors to network withglobal peers. Moreover, it was an opportunity for manyof those actors to engage in what might be called policyboosterism—a specific form of city marketing involvingthe active promotion of policies, programs, or practicesin order to enhance their reputation among, and to en-courage their adoption by, a wider community of policyactors (McCann 2009). As already noted, Vancouver’splanners, politicians, and consultants have been assidu-ous in educating colleagues elsewhere about what someof the more energetic policy boosters have taken tocalling “Vancouverism” (Berelowitz 2005; Price 2005a,2005b; Yuen 2005; Harcourt, Cameron, and Rossiter2007; Sharp and Boddy 2008). In planning documentsand meetings prior to WUF III, local organizers talked ofthe opportunity for delegates to experience Vancouveras a laboratory for sustainable urban development. Atthe Forum, local, provincial, and national politiciansconsistently invoked the city’s high ranking on globallivability rankings (“Top spot reminds us we have itpretty good” 2004; Beauchesne 2005; Economist Intel-ligence Unit 2005; Mercer Human Resource Consult-ing 2005) to support their view of the city as globallysignificant (Sullivan 2006; UN Habitat 2006a).

Furthermore, numerous conference sessions, with ti-tles including “Planning Successful Sustainable Cities:Case Study Vancouver, Canada,” focused on whatPunter (2003) has called “the Vancouver achievement”and featured many of the leading lights of the city’s ur-ban policy community. As a senior Vancouver plannerput it:

[I]t was great for the city. It was great to have all thepeople here. It was probably just as important for whatthey experienced than what anyone told them. Becausethe city kind of tells its own story. . . . I can’t tell you howmany groups and individuals approached me in the . . . barduring . . . the World Urban Forum, who said, “I’ve goneto the sessions, I’ve seen everything, but I still don’t knowhow you make it happen, and I want to know the breadand butter and the tinkering, the mechanics of it becausethere is something there that I want to take back to my

city.” (Interview, senior planner, Vancouver, September2006)

Strategically placed at the entrances to the down-town convention center where WUF III was held werepackages of nine glossy brochures produced by the Cityof Vancouver with the purpose of allowing delegatesto experience the city firsthand. Four of these docu-ments, with titles like “Introducing Our City and HowIt Works” and “How We Plan: Inclusivity in DecisionMaking,” sketched the city’s planning and governancepractices. The other five outlined walking and tran-sit tours of the city’s neighborhoods with an empha-sis on extant examples of policy innovation. All ninewere prominently branded with a green logo, showinga leaf superimposed on a silhouette of the city’s skylineand the inscription, “Livable City—Sustainable Future”(City of Vancouver 2006).

Conferences, meetings, and fact-finding visits are,then, key relational sites that are central to the socialprocess of teaching and learning about policy and, thus,to the contingent, cumulative, and emergent knowl-edge production processes that coconstitute urban pol-icy mobilities (Le Heron 2007; Le Heron and Lewis2007; Lewis, Larner, and Le Heron 2008). They offeropportunities for urban policy actors and informationalinfrastructures to influence and benefit from global cir-cuits of urban policy knowledge and allow concretesettings for researching how these global relational ge-ographies are produced.

Questions and Considerations Toward aResearch Agenda

The purpose of this article is to outline an analyticalapproach to the global circulation of urban policy mod-els, knowledge, and ideas. This approach is influenced,on the one hand, by geographical political economyarguments about the need to understand specific so-cial interactions in terms of wider processes, contexts,forces, and structures and the related need to main-tain a dual focus on fixity and flow, or territorialityand relationality, in the study of society. I combinethese insights with arguments about the need to payclose attention to the embodied practices, representa-tions, and expertise through which policy knowledge isdeveloped, mobilized, and operationalized in differentcontexts. The notion of mobilities captures this concep-tual nexus and, thus, I have employed it here as a rubricunder which to focus on the “local globalness” of urbanpolicymaking.



This discussion suggests that our understanding of ur-ban policy mobilities can benefit from a “global ethnog-raphy” that entails “a shift from studying ‘sites’ [e.g.,Vancouver] to studying ‘fields,’ that is, the relations be-tween sites” while maintaining one site as a “primaryperspective” (Gowan and O Riain 2000, xii; Burawoy2000, 30–31). This “extended case” method involvesethnographic engagement with participants and pro-cesses, careful attention to the external forces and con-nections shaping specific sites, and, as a result of thiswork, the extension of theory (Burawoy 2000, 26–28;Burawoy et al. 1991). The Vancouver case indicatesthat there is much more research to be done on the char-acter and implications of how urban actors act globally.Such a research agenda can be built at the intersectionof the theoretical and methodological considerationsidentified by Burawoy and his co-authors, but it mustbe specified further. In the remaining paragraphs I setout a number of questions and considerations that gosome way to constituting an agenda for research onpolicy mobilities.

Mobilities

It is important to begin by considering the concept ofmobilities itself. It is a relatively new one in the socialscience lexicon but one that has proliferated, largelydue to the productivity of a small number of scholarswho have applied the concept to specific topics andwho have sought to codify and institutionalize their ap-proach through programmatic statements, the creationof a research center (CeMoRe n.d.), and the publica-tion of a journal, Mobilities. This energetic promotionof an idea might be viewed skeptically, particularly ina context where mobilities can be seen to draw heavilyfrom already existing work on scale, relationality, andthe fixity–mobility dialectic. Yet, mobilities scholars areclear on their intellectual debts and mobilities is hardlythe first concept to be promoted by communities of in-terested scholars or to take on the characteristics of afad. Therefore, the mobilities approach should not bedismissed out of hand. Rather, the concept should beseen and utilized for what it is: one that when deployedcritically and in combination with others, allows useful,but by no means complete, insight into a specific set ofsocial processes.

The use of any concept has implications, of course.A focus on mobilities might tempt an uncritical andcelebratory stance toward humans’ abilities to movearound the planet. Yet, more sober analyses emphasizethat mobility is stratified and conditioned by access to

resources and by one’s identity (classed, racialized, gen-dered, etc.) as well as by one’s embeddedness in particu-lar institutional and political contexts that define a con-strained set of potential pathways for action (Peck andTheodore 2008). Not everyone has the same ability topay for Internet access, conference fees, or plane tickets,and many people, when they move, do so because theyhave been forced. The mobilities literature, acknowl-edging critiques of the romanticization and uncriticalacceptance of mobility as a given (Tsing 2000; Han-nam, Sheller, and Urry 2006), seems intent on avoid-ing the uncritical glamorization of mobility. The pointabout stratification is worth emphasizing nonetheless asa key conceptual consideration. In the context of ur-ban policy mobilities, specifically, it underscores boththe need to critically conceptualize urban policy actors’differing levels of fixity–mobility and differential, insti-tutionally conditioned access to global circuits of policyknowledge and also to conceptualize policy transfer andpolicy learning as sociospatially uneven and selectiveprocesses.

Specific questions that arise in this context includethe following: Why do some ideas and models travelwhereas others do not? Certainly, the policy trans-fer literature indicates a number of structural reasonswhy transfer becomes popular at certain times. Forexample, reductions in state staffing budgets coupledwith intensified competitive pressures and shorteneddeadlines increase the attractiveness of adopting ready-made, quick-fix, off-the-shelf policies from other juris-dictions or from private consultants. This “fast policytransfer” (Peck and Theodore 2001, 429) is also facili-tated by international organizations that encourage orforce the adoption of certain policy models (Peet 2002).These structural conditions are coupled with the rise ofcadres of policy consultants whose activities are moti-vated by the need to gain contracts, by considerationsof professional reputation, and by the belief that theycan help improve cities.

A second question involves the geographical un-evenness of policy transfer. Not all policies, even onesthat are locally successful, are mobilized or designatedas best practices. Similarly, not all cities feature in themental maps of policymakers or international institu-tions when they identify exemplars of best practice.Furthermore, certain policy consultants “go global,”whereas most do not. Why does this unevenness ex-ist and what are its implications? It would be too simpleto assume that certain best practices, cities, and consul-tants “naturally” rise to the top. Access to resourcessuch as time, travel budgets, the media, translation


122 McCann

services, and cultural capital would presumably makeit easier for certain policy boosters to articulate theirknowledge widely, and uneven access to those same re-sources would condition which urban actors are able tolearn from global conversations about good policy. Onemight surmise that, despite the efforts of organizationslike UN Habitat, poorer municipalities would be lesslikely to contribute to or learn from global policy mo-bilities. This is a hypothesis in need of further testing,however.8

It is the case that differential access to resourcesand the specific character of certain policy prescrip-tions condition the opportunities for certain actors andpolicies to have an impact beyond their home cities.Yet, there is evidence that subaltern groups and othersproposing counterhegemonic visions of urban policy dofind ways to act globally. The travels of consultants,politicians, policy professionals, and their policy modelsare in many ways paralleled, if not necessarily equaled,by the mobilities of NGOs and activists who find ways todisseminate alternative and innovate policy prescrip-tions. Indeed, these actors frequently inhabit and seekto utilize the infrastructures that also make more tradi-tional policy transfer possible, particularly the Internet.Questions of how and with what implications subalterngroups, such as drug users (McCann 2008) or humanrights activists (Bosco 2001), for example, are able to“inhabit” the same infrastructures as policy elites areworthy of further consideration.9

These questions indicate the need to understandurban policy mobilities neither in terms of fetishizedmobile objects or free-floating fields of transfer but toconceptualize them as produced by the social, spa-tial, institutional, ideological, and political contextsin which they are developed, applied, transferred, andadopted. As such, the study of the sites and pro-cesses of transfer must include analysis of the forcesthat condition them. Yet, an attention to these forces,tendencies, and structures involves the danger of ob-jectifying them and “making them appear inevitableand natural” (Burawoy 2000, 29). One of Burawoy’sstrategies for dealing with this problem seems aproposin this context. He endeavors to “see global [macro,external, or extralocal] forces as themselves the prod-uct of contingent social processes.” This conceptual-ization then leads to a methodological stance: “Hereforces become the topic of investigation; they are ex-amined as the product of flows of people, things, andideas, that is, the global connections between sites”(29).

Territoriality and Relationality

The integration of theory and method is, then, cen-tral to the development of this research agenda. Con-ceptualizing sites of policy transfer as global-relationalallows a move toward a form of global ethnographythrough, but not confined to, a primary case. This strat-egy might raise questions about the efficacy of the sin-gle case study as a source of general or generalizablestatements. There are strong and, for me, convincingstatements in the literature about the utility of thesingle-case method (Burawoy et al. 1991; Burawoy et al.2000; Herbert 2000; Flyvbjerg 2006). Comparative casestudies also offer potential insights into the study ofmobile policies (Ward 2008), as do multisited ethno-graphies (Marcus 1998; Olds 2001) and detailed ethno-graphic studies of knowledge networks (Riles 2001).The methods chosen in a specific study will relate to theconceptualizations employed and the empirical ques-tions asked. Various methods, in various combinations,will emerge. Each combination will paint a somewhatdifferent but not necessarily incompatible picture of thecharacter and consequences of urban policy mobilitiesand global circuits of knowledge.

For example, questions regarding the structural andhistorical contexts within which contemporary ur-ban policy mobilities have emerged can be addressedthrough the analysis of policy documents, Web sites,and blogs, coupled with semistructured qualitative in-terviews with key informants. Analysis of these sorts ofdata might then involve some form of discourse analy-sis (Lees 2004). Questions about the character and fre-quency of policy travel and intercity networking mightentail a set of quantitative and survey methods. Mailor Internet-based questionnaires might produce a broadsense of what city officials get from conferences and sitevisits (Wolman and Page 2000) and how their travelis patterned and funded. This method would provide ageneral understanding, for example, of which city gov-ernments tend to fund fact-finding trips, which citiesare most visited by delegations, and at which scale(regional, national, global) intercity connections arestrongest. Analysis of these data might not only en-tail standard statistical methods and the mapping ofthe results (graduated circle maps of the most visitedcities, for example) but might also entail network visu-alization or mapping of policy networks and knowledgedomains. They might identify key locations, policies,and individuals who seem to be central to discus-sions over high-quality and transferrable urban policies,



formal and informal linkages among cities, common ordivergent goals, and clusters of organizations aroundparticular agendas (Brandes et al. 1999; Skupin 2004).

The dualism between these qualitative and quanti-tative methods is often usefully transcended, of course,and these methods could also be complemented byethnographic methods, defined by some form of partic-ipation and observation (Herbert 2000) and intendedto understand the social process of transfer and learn-ing within and among communities of practitioners.It is on this aspect of policy mobilities that much ofthis article has focused, as it argues for the utility ofsemistructured qualitative interviews, document anal-ysis, and ethnographic observation of site visits, fact-finding trips, meetings with visiting delegations andconsultants, and various types of conferences, sympo-siums, and forums. Although there is literature thatexplicitly discusses anthropological or ethnographic as-pects of policy research (e.g., Shore and Wright 1997),and although a great deal of the geography and urbanstudies literature on urban policy and politics relies onforms of qualitative and ethnographic inquiry, there isremarkably little scholarship on how conferences mightbe studied ethnographically as research sites, where dis-persed communities of policy actors come together inone place to strengthen their ties, share knowledge, andso on. More work is needed in this area if the importanceof conferences and site visits to urban policy mobilitiesis to be understood. Similarly, if travel, including pol-icy travel, is to be understood as productive rather thandead time, ethnographic research—being with delega-tions on trips elsewhere, in meetings, and on site—isneeded on these mobile communities to better com-prehend how exactly such time is productive for urbanpolicymaking. This, of course, demands a great deal oftime and funding from the researcher, which could bewhy it constitutes a gap in the literature!

A concern with global ethnography emphasizes con-ceptual considerations once more. Specifically, the needto employ a methodological lens that focuses simultane-ously on specific sites and on global forces, connections,and imaginaries reflects a concern with how to theorizethe relationships between fixity and mobility, or terri-toriality and relationality, in the context of geographiesof policy. A conceptualization of the productive ten-sion between fixity and mobility is, of course, centralto Harvey’s (1982) historical–geographical materialistapproach to capitalist development. Notions of territo-riality and relationality have, for the most part, beenless closely linked in the study of cities, however (butsee Beaumont and Nicholls 2007). Many political geog-

raphers have tended to emphasize the role of the former,whereas others have, in varying ways, sought to high-light the mutually constitutive relationships betweencities and global processes. The mobilities perspectiveoffers the opportunity to think about contemporary ur-ban policymaking and politics in terms of the connec-tions between territoriality and relationality because itemphasizes that although knowledge might be under-stood to “flow” around the world, it is only “actionable”and productive when it is embedded or territorialized inspecific social, spatial, and institutional contexts (Peckand Theodore 2008). If, as Beaumont and Nicholls(2007, 2559) argued, “[t]erritories do not come at theexpense of extensive networks and flows but, rather,they are constituted by and contribute to these socialnetworks,” then I would argue it is through the carefulempirical tracing of social interactions across variousscales that conceptualizations of relationality and terri-toriality can be further developed (N. Rose 1999, 12–13;Peck 2003; McCann and Ward 2010).

Research might focus, for example, on questions ofpolitics and power as, for example, territorially depen-dent growth coalitions engage with global circuits ofpolicy knowledge to adopt policies that serve their inter-ests. In turn, this leads to the question of what are the lo-cal political implications of the increased normalizationof interurban policy comparison and transfer? No urbanpolicy is ever universally accepted. Any policy servesdifferent interests differently or favors the interests ofsome over others. Therefore, policies that encouragedowntown residential development are frequently op-posed as gentrifying strategies that displace low-incomeresidents in favor of wealthy condo dwellers, for exam-ple. If such policies are lauded and copied globally asbest practice in terms of urban revitalization and sus-tainability, questions arise about the political force andlegitimacy such positive attention lends them in thelocalities where they were developed. Is it more dif-ficult to question or change local policies when theyhave been branded as best not only by local officialsbut also by a range of other cities and organizations?Similarly, when a policy model is transferred into a cityfrom elsewhere and has been anointed as best, is it againmore difficult to question its precepts, implications, andattendant interests?

Furthermore, I have argued that two crucial elementsof policy mobilities are site visits and conference atten-dance; that face-to-face interactions in these globalizingmicrospaces play a central role in shaping policies andpolicy learning. This leads to another set of questionsrelated to territorialized politics and global relations.


124 McCann

First, what are the political characteristics and implica-tions of policy travel when it is defined as necessary forfact-finding versus when it is defined as wasteful “jun-keting?” Accusations of junketing are common in localpolitics and the study of this political discourse in thecontext of global policy mobilities offers the opportu-nity to extend the case out beyond the merely local.Second, what might be the impacts on policy learn-ing and on “local” politics of periods of increased oilprices and related rises in the cost of travel, such asthe period prior to the current global economic crisis?Does attendance at policy conferences or the numberand size of fact-finding delegations decline as costs riseand municipal budgets are tightened? Do city officials,consultants, and activists see the quality of informationgained from other sources like the Internet, phone calls,video conferences, or printed reports as being equal tothe quality of understanding gained from on-site learn-ing (thus allowing them to reduce their policy travel)?Third, how do those engaged in policy travel, thosewho travel elsewhere to teach or learn about policy,attach meaning to and practically negotiate questionsof budgetary responsibility and environmental ethics?Do popular worries about the environmental impacts ofair travel, for example, influence decisions about pol-icy travel, perhaps particularly for transfer agents whoseteaching and learning is directed toward questions ofsustainability? These and other questions will, as I havesuggested, point to a range of methods ranging fromsurveys to ethnographic engagement with individualswho might not be willing to talk about ethical consid-erations, for example, until they have developed trustwith the researcher. In turn, these questions offer theopportunity to further theorize the power-laden pro-cesses and forces that constitute global circuits of policyknowledge.

Dangers of Diffusionism

The purpose of a global ethnographic approach is tofree this type of process-oriented research from the “nar-row boundaries of the traditional ethnographic ‘site”’(Gowan and O Riain 2000, xii). Therefore, I will con-clude with a cautionary observation about the concep-tual difficulties of extending the details of a specific caseback out to the global. A great deal of recent urban stud-ies has been marked by problematic attempts to assertone city as the quintessence of much wider processes ofurbanization and as the place where most noteworthyinnovation occurs. Los Angeles is the obvious exam-ple of this tendency, but it is only one of many, as a

recent symposium in the Urban Affairs Review and vari-ous critiques of the global or world cities approach havesuggested (McCann 2002, 2004; Robinson 2002, 2006;Dear and Dahmann 2008; Mollenkopf 2008; Simpsonand Kelly 2008). It would be equally problematic toposition Vancouver as the center of global policy inno-vation, and this has certainly not been my intention.

A resort to a form of synecdoche—where a part isrepresented as standing for the whole—is conceptuallyproblematic (McCann 2002). Among other things, itinvolves a dangerous tendency toward diffusionism. ForBlaut (1987, 1993), diffusionism involves a belief thatinventiveness is scarce and concentrated in a few ad-vanced and progressive places from which innovationsflow to the rest of the world. Diffusionism is “spatialelitism,” Blaut (1993, 12) argued. It inscribes a geog-raphy of center and periphery on the world, justifyingperspectives and practices that denigrate and exploitthe innovations of the many in service of the few. Now,Blaut’s argument is concerned with Eurocentrism andcolonialism through history, but his admonition againstspatial elitism is relevant to the study of contempo-rary urban policy mobilities. There is a distinct danger,after all, that accounts of specific cities, their policyinnovations, and their prominence in global conversa-tions about best practices can position them as “special”places (naturally) endowed with uncommon amounts ofinnovatory capacity. Local policy boosters would likelywelcome this sort of account. It would be an uncriticaland politically problematic approach, however, becauseit would fail to address the wider historical, geographi-cal, cultural, and political-economic contexts in whichpolicy innovations are developed and mobilized. It isat the nexus of specific case study sites and these widerforces that further research on urban policy mobilitiescan best be directed.

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to those who agreed to be interviewedfor the project. Thanks to Stephanie Campbell andRini Sumartojo for research assistance, to Jamie Peckand Kevin Ward who provided very helpful commentson an earlier draft, to three anonymous Annals review-ers, and to Audrey Kobayashi. Elements of the arti-cle were presented at the Association of AmericanGeographers meetings in San Francisco (2007), andBoston (2008), and at the Institut fur Humangeogra-phie, Goethe-Universitat Frankfurt am Main, Germany(2008). The research was funded by an Social Sciences



and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) StandardGrant, a Simon Fraser University (SFU)/SSHRC In-stitutional Grant, an SFU President’s Research Grant,and an SFU Endowed Research Fellowship. The usualdisclaimers apply.

Notes1. The impact of these circuits on specific places is not only

a contemporary phenomenon and any discussion of urbandevelopment in this context must acknowledge the longhistory of largely unequal exchanges of knowledge aroundthe world. The landscapes of cities that are, or have been,on both sides of colonial connections exhibit clear evi-dence of exchange and interaction (Saunier 2002; Nasrand Volait 2003).

2. These activities have also been referred to as lesson-drawing (R. Rose 1991, 1993; Robertson 1991), emula-tion (Bennett 1991), imitation (Jacoby 2001), importation(Hoyt 2006), and even pinching (Schneider and Ingram1988).

3. Again, this notion of copresence, or “co-gredience” (Har-vey 1996, 259–60), has been a feature of geographicalliteratures on place and scale (Merrifield 1993; Amin andGraham 1997; McCann 2002).

4. As will become clear later, the tensions between physicalproximity and “relational proximity” (Amin and Cohen-det 1999, 2004) in the production of economic knowledgeare also in the production of urban policy knowledge.

5. Burawoy and his coauthors suggested that this approachmust, for logistical reasons, almost always take one site asits primary vantage point (Burawoy et al. 2000).

6. Starting here with local actors is not intended to suggestthat the local is the most real, authentic, or necessaryscale.

7. It is important to note that, in all likelihood, visitingdelegations will only be presented with the positives of asituation and are less likely to hear from local critics orskeptical evaluators of a program (see Wolman 1992).

8. It is important to acknowledge that cities in the globalsouth—Curitiba or Porto Alegre, for example—have sig-nificant influence on policy thinking in the north (Baioc-chi 2003; Moore 2007).

9. It is worth emphasizing that counterhegemonic groupsalso see the need to build their own separate infrastruc-tures, such as the World Social Forum, to aid in the mo-bilization of their policy ideas and political agendas.

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Correspondence: Department of Geography, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6, Canada, e-mail: [email protected].


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