RC21 CONFERENCE 2013
Resourceful cities
Berlin (Germany), 29-31 August 2013
Humboldt-University Berlin, Institute for Social Science, Dept. for Urban and Regional Sociology
Making up cities: urban policy mobilities, assemblages and urban politics in a global age
This session focuses on how cities as collective actors (or key urban actors within cities) draw on a range of resources of resources in the process of developing and legitimizing (new) urban development strategies and urban policies: policy ideas, models, ‘good practices’ and ‘urban imaginaries’ borrowed from other places within or beyond their national territory. These resources are constituted by ‘socially produced and circulated forms of knowledge addressing how to design and govern cities that develop in, are conditioned by, travel through, connect, and shape various spatial scales, networks, policy communities, and institutional contexts’ (McCann 2011: 109). In various strands of urban studies there is now a growing literature conceptualizing urban policies as both relational and territorial, in motion and fixed (Cochrane and Ward 2012, McCann and Ward 2011, Robinson 2011), as reflected in notions of ‘policy mobilities’ (McCann, Ward), ‘urban learning assemblage’ (McFarlane), ‘policies in motion’ (Peck, Theodore), ‘spaces of circulating knowledge’ (Robinson).
The papers will include a mix of theoretical contributions and a wide range of case studies of policy transfer, translation, mobilities and assemblages within and between cities and regions across the globe (within and between the global North and South), addressing the following questions:
- How to empirically investigate processes of policy mobilities and policy assemblages within and between cities? (focus on methodological challenges and opportunities)
- What are the various actors, channels and sites involved in the circulation, diffusion, mobility and assemblage of urban policies and models? (focus on the local and global knowledge infrastructure)
- What are the socio-spatial consequences in particular locales of the increasing international circulation of policy models and ideas? (focus on the power dimension and urban political implications of policy mobilities and on the outcome of processes of assemblage).
Session Organizers
Prof. Allan Cochrane, Professor of Urban Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, United Kingdom, E: Allan.Cochrane@open.ac.uk
Dr. Claire Colomb, Senior Lecturer in Urban Sociology & European Spatial Planning, The Bartlett School of Planning, University College London (UCL), Wates House (432a), 22 Gordon Street, London WC1H 0QB, United Kingdom, E: c.colomb@ucl.ac.uk
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