Mobile Urbanism: Cities and Policymaking in the Global Age (review)

Mobile Urbanism is a collection of case studies focused on urban policy mobility. It deals with questions surrounding how urban policies are conceptualized and put into practice in one location to achieve specific goals and then transferred or adapted to another location in order to achieve similar goals.

In our globalized world, it’s easier than ever for administrators and policymakers to observe the success of urban renewal in, say, downtown Los Angeles, and move to adopt LA’s successful policies in their own location. There are a myriad of challenges associated with this sort of transfer. The book’s case studies address the geographic and political difficulties of policy transfer, mobile policies, and urban-global relations through a number of different techniques and at different scales.

One of the book’s stated goals is to re-theorize urban policymaking as a consideration of both “territorial” and “relational” geographies (p 3, p 167). “In the simplest terms, this might be read as the contrast between a focus on connections (and lack of connections), on the one hand, and a focus on places, on the other” (p 3). Repositioning “territorial” and “relational” views into a mutually inclusive concept of place is a goal easily met by Mobile Urbanism’s case studies, which view urban spaces both as unique places geographically, but also as unique places in their comparative position vis a vis other cities.

On a whole, the case studies broaden the scope of whom we ought to consider involved in the business of policy making. The authors didn’t deal solely with government agencies and elected officials. In doing so they demonstrate how community leaders, private professionals and others actors otherwise outside the mechanism of government affect policy decisions and play a hand in their conceptualization and implementation.

Where the book really shines, however, is in the case studies themselves. Together, they explore how “policies are uprooted, mobilized, and circulated across space, transformed in some cases along the way” (p 170). The case studies differ in scope and scale. Some deal with urban-urban relations while others show how different cities create policy based on practices first instituted elsewhere. There are two chapters in particular that make for interesting reads.

James Peck’s chapter on “creative” urban policies is both timely and interesting. In the case study, Peck contrasts a creative, grassroots policy movement in 1980s London with today’s “creative marketplace[s],” which “[S]pread because they conform, not because they ‘work”’ (p 63). I highlight this chapter because Richard Florida’s creative policies seem to be the urban theory of the moment. Florida has one of the world’s loudest voices in the popular discussion of urban studies: a senior editor at the Atlantic Monthly, he oversees a web-site, Atlantic Cities (backed by the magazine), dedicated to urbanism.

The second chapter worth briefly highlighting is Eugene McCann’s study of the politics of urban drug policy in Vancouver. The study details the fallout surrounding the adaptation of two competing, ideologically different drug policies. I found McCann’s study to be the most accessible in the book, clearly addressing specific instances of policy transfer and employing a subject that most people are familiar with. I think students would find it particularly interesting.

Mobile Urbanism would be a valuable resource for urban geographers and urban planners interested in policy transfer. The case studies are diverse and of a high quality. Some of them may serve as valuable teaching tools for upper-level geography classes dealing with international issues or urban studies.

I doubt the book’s suitability for lower-level students, however, because while some of the articles are perfectly accessible and clearly written, others are jargon filled and dense, despite their potentially interesting subject matter. Furthermore, the case studies deal primarily with the English– speaking world, making the work less valuable to scholars or students focused on other parts...