How Cities Learn. Astrid Wood
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percent Indian, 12 percent Black, and 4 percent Coloured.3 The meetings took place across South Africa from the Union Buildings and Parliament to the Civic Centre in Cape Town, the Metro Building in Johannesburg and the Transport Authority in eThekwini. More than two-thirds of meetings took place in either Cape Town or Johannesburg. Ten percent of respondents were located outside of South Africa – in Barcelona, Bogotá, Dar es Salaam, London, Manila, New York, Vancouver and Washington, D.C. – and these tended to be international consultants and academics. The majority of meetings were held in person at the participant’s office. On average, the interviews took 1 hour and 30 minutes with the longest lasting 3 hours and 37 minutes and the shortest lasting just 20 minutes.
In selecting study participants, I was careful to avoid merely “studying up”, by which Nader (1972) refers to studying the elites with power or “studying down”, by asking the powerless. Instead, I “study through” (Shore and Wright 1997). This meant meeting with the actors who moved, shaped and adopted as well as those who opposed BRT. The list of interviewees included those currently involved in BRT introduction – for example each city’s transportation officers, municipal politicians and engineers in the implementation agency – as well as those actors who have since moved on to other ventures – for example, from a city official to a private portfolio manager and from a minibus taxi driver to the CEO of a bus operating company.
I was also cautious against promoting agent-inflation, through which relatively unimportant actors become policy mobilizers by virtue of our discussion. I never asked a policy actor to tell me about their experiences with BRT. Rather, I asked respondents a few general questions about transportation to which they generally responded telling me about the BRT project, which included their experiences with policy mobilizers like Lloyd Wright and Enrique Penalosa, and on study tours to Bogotá. Philip van Ryneveld’s role in bringing BRT to Cape Town, for instance, came up in several meetings across South Africa, none of which were prompted by me. I was careful to verify stories and experiences across interviews and with both internal and public documents.
Interviews were the primary methodology I adopted, but because that meant asking the individuals to describe their involvement, transcripts were triangulated with internal documents recording council meetings and study tours, as well as with public reports and presentations detailing implementation procedures. I reviewed more than a hundred important planning and policy documents found in the archives at both municipal and private planning offices, as well as frameworks (e.g. City of Johannesburg 2011), guides (e.g. ITDP 2017) and legislation (e.g. National Department of Transport 2009). I also evaluated advertising notices, architectural models, blueprints, brochures, films and websites. The urban successes “come alive” in clever policy documents and stunning showrooms (Pow 2014: 296). And seemingly mundane artifacts become “diverse technologies of seduction” that render policy models palatable for global consumption, thus revealing the socio-materiality of policy exchange (Bunnell and Das 2010).
Since BRT construction was ongoing and plans constantly emerging and changing, I also had opportunities to attend public meetings through which city officials publicized BRT, seminars wherein practical details were revealed to practitioners, and strategic meetings usually reserved for those directly involved with BRT. A public lecture by Gil Penalosa, Commissioner of Parks in Bogotá from 1999 to 2002, provided me with the opportunity to witness a policy mobilizer in-action as he introduced his perspective to a South African audience. Events such as this were often referenced in interviews – for example when Enrique Penalosa, former Mayor of Bogotá, or when Lloyd Wright, a global BRT advocate, presented the attributes of BRT to South Africans – as quasi-religious events full of animation and energy supported by high-resolution images of success. It was particularly informative to personally witness this style of knowledge exchange and have the opportunity to think about why it is so compelling.
All these methods require a willingness to move, but none are as mobile as the “go-along”, which tends be either a walking interview (Carpiano 2009; Evans and Jones 2011) or a driving interview (Laurier 2004, 2008). The go-along accounts for the relationship between what people say and where they say it, and overall the process promises sounder results than sedentary interviews by prompting interviewees to connect with the surrounding landscape rather than the interviewer. Such methods reflect Simmel’s (1950) perspective on social space, which he sees as the context for the creation of particular personalities and interactions (e.g. the stranger), and provides great insight into the learning process by allowing the researcher to examine participant’s knowledge and experiences, as well as the way in which they engage with their social and spatial surroundings. The go-along is also particularly useful in reducing the typical power dynamics between the researcher and the subject.
My mobile methods included trips on the operational systems, tours of the bus depot and control center and driving tours across the city. Ordinary journeys on Cape Town’s MyCiTi and Johannesburg’s Rea Vaya usually included conversations with drivers and passengers. One driver told me how much he misses driving a taxi because he has to work many more hours as a Rea Vaya bus operator, while another prefers the regular employment and guaranteed salary. One of the more extraordinary mobile interviews was a driving tour with Ron Haiden, then-Manager of Infrastructure and Development in Cape Town. We drove for hours visiting and discussing transportation systems and services across Cape Town. I learned a great deal from seeing the projects first-hand and I enjoyed hearing anecdotes about “The Wright and (w)Ron(g) Show” (when Haiden worked with Lloyd Wright). Haiden’s insights into both the details of station design as well as the big picture needed to conceptualize Cape Town’s entire MyCiTi system, were extremely valuable in situating BRT within the broader efforts at transportation transformation.
My professional experiences working with South African cities also provided me with the foundations from which to launch this research. Between 2008 and 2010, I worked as Programs Manager for the South African Cities Network (SACN). In this capacity, I was responsible for a variety of projects, programs and publications, including managing exchanges between cities implementing BRT systems. One interesting project was a learning event hosted jointly with Johannesburg in October 2009, in which the City invited other South African cities to ride the new BRT system and learn from Johannesburg. My experience with the distribution of BRT makes me a policy actor and thereby has enabled me to draw on my own experiences, while simultaneously having access to empirical knowledge of the policymaking process. These experiences empower me to “reconstruct a landscape in the eyes of its occupants” and to imagine the experiences of policy actors (Samuels 1981: 129). Although I did not occupy a formal position after 2010, I acknowledge my role as a formerly active policy actor entering into circulation processes with local actors.
Structure of the Book
How Cities Learn is organized into seven chapters including this introduction. Chapter 2, “Geographies of knowledge”, provides the analytical scaffolding for this book. It introduces the policy mobilities framework which will be used to explain the multiple and complex relations between actors, which elevate the achievements of particular policies and bring certain cities into conversation with one another, while pushing other ideas, policymakers and places further apart.
Chapter 3, “Translating BRT to South Africa”, traces the global geography of BRT to understand what features attracted South African policymakers and, in so doing, reflects on the theoretical notion of best practice policy models and their process of mobilization, mutation and translation. Moving away from the assumption that BRT is merely a technological template for stations and busways, this chapter reveals that the Bogotá model was not replicated in South African cities but rather that a variation, which focused on the transformation of the informal transit system, emerged. This suggests that policy models are polysemic, and rather than being duplicated they are modified and mutated to suit the needs of each importing jurisdiction. The adoption of best practice therefore takes place only when aspects of the circulating notion combine with underlying conditions, thereby normalizing the particular technical arrangements and social rationalities for adoption.
Chapter 4, “Actors and associations circulating BRT”, focuses on the urban planning professionals, practitioners