-
8. Ideas That Travel
- Temple University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
8 Ideas That Travel O f course, New York City is not the only metropolis grappling with questions of urban transformation to have turned to Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses in search of ideas and inspiration. Indeed, many of the social, political, and economic forces that made New York a crucible of urban policy were at work in cities across the United States and Canada in the postwar years. So while the legacies of the two figures were cemented in New York, and their ideas about how best to build successful cities continue to resonate loudly in debates about redevelopment there, Jacobs and Moses have traveled, both literally and figuratively, influencing built environments and framing articulations of urban policy in other cities at specific times as well. Facilitating the widespread adoption of their ideas in far-flung places has been a process of policy production and sharing originally conceived as fixed “policy transfer,” or the wholesale implementation by one entity of successful strategies developed by another (Dolowitz and Marsh 1996). More recently, this notion of an efficient, one-way transfer of knowledge from producer-innovators to consumer-emulators has come to be viewed as overly simplistic, and a new formulation, characterized as “policy mobility ” (Peck and Theodore 2010; McCann 2011), has emerged. In the urban sense, policy mobility can be defined as “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 spatial scales, networks, policy communities, and institutional contexts” (McCann 2011, 109). In this later formulation practitioners looking for 116 Chapter 8 answers to their own urban problems scour the globe, searching for “best practices to embrace, ‘cutting edge’ cities to emulate, and ‘hot’ experts from whom to learn” (McCann 2011, 114). Within this view, the manner by which by policy makers adopt policies is not some simple transfer of favored models from point A to point B in a competitive marketplace of ideas. Instead, the sharing of models can be seen as the transmission of highly ideological and selective discourses imbedded with explicit sets of “rules, techniques and behaviors” (Peck and Theodore 2010, 170). These policies are often articulated as best practices that have emerged from the “right”—read ideologically sanctioned—sites by “policy peddlers and gurus” who traffic in “models that affirm and extend” “dominant paradigms” and existing power relations . These mobile policies are transmitted between “members of epistemic , expert and practice communities,” but because of local variations in institutional, economic, and political contexts, they “rarely travel as complete packages” (Peck and Theodore 2010, 170–171). Instead, they arrive as “idealized abstractions” whose representational power is subject to translation, interpretation, and synthesis. In effect, such policies serve as “powerful political narratives” that legitimate and valorize existing development models (McCann 2011, 108). The contemporary spread of neoliberal forms of urbanism—in which “creating livable and attractive environments for certain class factions as a central part of a wider economic development strategy” (McCann 2004, 1910)—has proven particularly amenable to the policy mobility idea. What urban geographers Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore describe as the “viral spread of creative city policies” offers one particularly illustrative example. As a favored policy fix of the early twenty-first century, the mobility idea was predicated on an array of supportive conditions and enabling networks, including : stylized, but ground-truthed claims about the underlying causes of innovation-rich growth in cities like Austin, TX and San Francisco; Richard Florida’s brand of guru performativity; the easy manualization of creative-city policy techniques by consultants and other policy intermediaries; and, not least, the competitive anxieties and fiscal constraints of cities around the world. (Peck and Theodore 2010, 171) The fact that the concept draws from ideas first articulated by Jane Jacobs certainly did not hurt, either. Still, long before Jacobs’s notions of diversity and dynamism found a new home in Florida’s conception of the creative city, city leaders and planners were looking to her—and her arch nemesis, Moses—for urban best practices to adopt, emulate, and adapt.1 [107.21.176.63] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01:46 GMT) Ideas That Travel 117 Thus, Jacobs and Moses continue to stand out as particularly resonant experts from whom leaders of urban transformation have chosen to learn. Moses in Portland: “A Shot in the Arm” For Moses, no city outside of New York bears his physical imprint more than Portland, Oregon, where a familiar pattern of plans...