Travelling Policies:

Reframing the Geographies of Urban Comparison, Learning and Exchange

Abstract

Situating this Special Issue requires us to draw on relational connections and think through elsewhere. It fundamentally takes us back a couple of years to a series of convention centres, hotel conference rooms and a small restaurant in downtown Denver, Colorado – the host city of the 2023 Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting. As a globally recognised forum of intellectual exchange, the AAG Annual Meeting brings together thousands of geographers and scholars from related disciplines to advance debates, generate cutting-edge ideas and rethink existing or build new theorisations and tactics for understanding the complexities of twenty-first-century spatial processes and their path-dependent trajectories.

These intellectual imperatives coalesced in the organising of a thematic session titled “Urban Competitiveness and Urban Policy Mobilities: Rethinking North-South Narratives”. As is often the case at academic conferences, the rendering of these imperatives extended beyond official AAG Annual Meeting venues – into coffee breaks, informal gatherings and shared meals and drinks at local restaurants –, with organisers and presenters socialising and exchanging business cards, e-mails and ideas in the following months (Craggs & Mahony, 2014; Ward, 2024a). In particular, our session and its collateral ‘downtimes’ proved particularly generative and well-matched with growing geographic debates on the ‘making-up’ of urban policy futures (Baker & Temenos, 2015; McCann & Ward, 2013; Silva & Ward, 2024) and the broader intellectual shift toward more global, particularised and provincial approaches to urban policymaking studies (Addie, 2020; Leitner & Sheppard, 2016; Peck, 2017; Robinson, 2015a, 2022).

Much of the logic behind the assembling of this session departed from the general assumption that twenty-first-century policymakers now live and govern in an age of fast-moving policies (Baker & Walker, 2019). Indeed, policymakers have “become highly adept at sharing and adapting new innovations on their own, accelerating the diffusion of good ideas and speeding global [policy] learning” and exchange (UN-HABITAT, 2020, p. 205).

While it is debatable whether these practices are new, it almost goes without saying that policymakers and those interested in the study of policymaking processes, such as urban geographers, political anthropologists or political scientists, are now experiencing “a perfect storm of global crises” (Hartley et al., 2019, p. 164) or a context of “poly-crisis” (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], 2023, p. 9), all of which ended up producing a set of economic, political or social disruptions. Climate change, environmental degradation, economic downturns, housing shocks and, of course, health crises are just a few examples, some of which surfaced in our session programme and discussions, both within formal presentations and through informal exchanges over coffee breaks, emails and follow-up conversations after the conference had ended.

This Special Issue is thus a product of multiple ‘heres’, ‘elsewheres’ and ‘tempos’. At its core, it brings together a selection of papers and presentations made in and beyond the conference venues of downtown Denver at the 2023 AAG, where Cristina Temenos (University of Manchester) played a pivotal role as a guest discussant. Simultaneously, it encapsulates a series of relevant contributions that emerged outside downtown Denver from an open call issued during the assembly of this Special Issue. Together, these two sets of contributions are comfortably situated within recent and still-emerging debates in urban geography and cognate disciplines under the banner of urban policy mobilities studies (Baker & Temenos, 2015; McCann & Ward, 2013). However, central to them is also a signpost of new insights and a substantial research agenda arguing for a reformatted conceptual and ontological reflection and empirical investigation within policy mobilities studies that hold particular promise for advancing, extending or renewing the understanding of key aspects of the policymaking world in the twenty-first century (Robinson, 2015b; Silva & Ward, 2024; Ward, 2024a).