How Cities Learn. Astrid Wood

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How Cities Learn - Astrid Wood


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      Also of interest is a study by Ward (2011) that offers insight into the actors and their methods for employing policy models in Manchester, UK. Their research focuses on Manchester city officials pursuing knowledge of Olympic and Commonwealth Games projects, and specifically the techniques in which they learned from previous host cities to exploit these opportunities to engage in broader economic development strategies. Officials visited cities whose best practice in hosting mega events had been broadcast around the world, such as Los Angeles and Lillehammer; their meetings with officials as well as site visits to sports-related infrastructure and associated regeneration sites were used to execute the redevelopment of east Manchester. In this case, the city’s failed bid to host a mega-event did not deter them from implementing the learning. Such points offer an opportunity to consider the manner in which local politics is used to convince (or subvert) particular actions and determinations taking place elsewhere as a part of the learning process. It also provides evidence of the importance of previous policy failure in ongoing decisions.

      Chapter 4 explores the varied and sometimes unexpected decisions by policy actors as expressions of power relations, as well as the relationships formed prior to and because of the circulation process, which facilitates the adoption of ideas from elsewhere. This includes some reflection on actor-network theory and an exploration of both human and nonhuman actors within policy mobilities. In Chapter 4, I draw on Deleuzian ideas of assemblages to theorize and explain how networks form and sustain these circulations as part of network formation and assembly (Deleuze and Guattari 1972, 2004; Foucault 2003; Rabinow 1984). This theorization places policy travels and transfers alongside a host of urban happenings – capitalism, political contestation, as well as learning and mobility (Farias and Bender 2010; McFarlane 2011b). Larner and Laurie (2010) show how, within these global assemblages, experts easily travel between places mobilizing transnational flows (see also Larner 2002). Both McFarlane’s (2009) study of transnational movements and Robins’ (2008) research into social movements use this approach to demonstrate how networks exchange experiences, ideas and resources across the globe. McFarlane (2011a) interprets the movement of knowledge across spatiotemporal circumstances through the notion of assemblage, in which the actors and their knowledge and materials form an agglomeration. It is important to realize though that the assemblage is temporary – it constantly adjusts and alters over time (Ong and Collier 2005).

      Tracing through Cities

      The relationships between cities play a central role in this study. A range of economic and political characteristics bring certain cities into conversation with one another, while pushing others further apart. The learning process often requires localities to work closely together, sharing private technical and political information and, in many instances, spending extended periods collaborating. Peck and Theodore (2001, 2010b ), for example, present instances of the transfer of poverty alleviation policies between the UK and the US during the Thatcher/Reagan and Blair/Clinton eras, arguing that the friendship between the political leaders predisposed the governments to collaborate. The manner in which commonalities in government and policymaking contexts enable policies to transfer across socio-political boundaries is also evident in studies of the transnationalization of the business improvement district, where geographical proximity between the UK and Europe was disregarded in favour of exchange of political associations (Ward 2007a, 2011). There have also been studies of similar accounts of ideological exchanges between the former Soviet countries (Cook et al. 2014b; Offe 1996), as well as between European cities after the Second World War (Clarke 2010; Vion 2002). In such instances of “municipal diplomacy” (Saunier 2002: 526), cities are not merely importers or exporters of policy but part of the global system of power relations in which policy circulates.


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