Normativa y legislación

The ‘garden city’ and ‘smart growth’ models, policies, ideas, practices, whatever we may wish to represent them as (‘words’ would be my preferred choice19_{) were not imported from} elsewhere and inserted into the context of Sacramento and Lusaka as rigid forms of transfer or even as more complex processes of ‘mobility’. Or, rather, they were, it’s just that this took place 157 and 103 years ago respectively, and was facilitated not by complex processes of ‘moulding’ and ‘adaptation’ but by the crushing of resistance and the cultivating of an entire cultural identity around what ‘the city’ is and what it is supposed to do (chapter four). As a result of this, subsequent visions of the future are mapped out through entanglement with not only the material legacies of the past, but also with nostalgic aspirations for a previous era of planning control. In laying out its theoretical origins, research on ‘policy mobility’ is clear that its agenda can be seen as taking a step to problematize, from a spatial perspective, previous literature on ‘policy transfer’ that proliferated within political science (Cook 2015; McCann and Ward 2012; Wood 2016). The argument here is that this previous research “focus[es]too much on agents and not enough on agency” and for “focusing too little on the way they mutate as they move” (Cook 2015). This shift from ‘agents’ to ‘agency’, however, is hindered in its ability to a) properly account for the issue of power, and b) explore the true extent of the possibilities of reconceptualising policy making in relation to the ‘city’ as an

assemblage.

A desire to view ‘policy’ not as something that moves as a wholesome model between one location and the next but as a more complex and heterogeneous process leaves the policy mobility work with an ambivalence about power that “clouds the whole issue by creating the impression that power as well as resources actually flows and circulates” (Allen 2008:63). It becomes very difficult to avoid the trap identified by Faulconbridge (2006) as global-explicit (policy ‘solution’) and tacit-local (situated ‘problem’) interpretations of policy, which, rather

19 _{My inspiration for this comes from Carol Gluck and Anna Tsing’s book Words in Motion (2009) which examines}

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than facilitating our ability to investigate actually existing relations, further entrenches the divide between the global and the local. The relative nature of knowledge that stems from its negotiated formation in context can be seen as rooted in a wider interpretation of what counts as ‘knowledge’ (Verbole 2000). As Allen describes, the ‘truth claims of authority figures’ which take on an assumption of extensive, even ‘global’, reach, are themselves networked together by an “authorizing centre through which all translations must pass” (ibid.147). This is precisely what Tsing (2000) is critiquing when she describes a failure to problematize the ‘carving of the channel’ but a readiness to glorify the narrative of the subsequent ‘flows’ (ibid.331). To suggest this is simply a neglect of history, however, would be too simplistic a critique. What it is in actual fact is a failure to take into account the “irreversibility” of process. This manifests itself because of a reliance on what Saldanha (2006) describes as a “post-modern dialectic” of fixity and flow involving neoliberalism as a ‘mobile’ technology of governance and policy making.

By bringing a relational angle to conversations on policy transfer, policy mobility appears to be adding levels of complexity to this policy transfer work by problematizing the notion of ‘transfer’, rather than the underlying functions of power that facilitate transfer, and indeed stabilise the definitions of what constitutes ‘policy’. It is for this reason that I level the above charge of post-modernism at policy mobility research. Policy transfer literature, because of its modernist angle, actually offers a much more effective conceptualisation of the way ideas have come to exist in different parts of the world, from which to orientate an engaged critique. Richard Rose’s (1993) book for example, entitled Lesson-drawing in Public Policy: A Guide to Learning Across Time and Space, builds on his (1991) idea of ‘psychological proximity’, which acknowledges the “subjective definition of proximity, epistemic communities linking experts together, functional interdependence between governments and the authority of intergovernmental institutions” (ibid.3). The fundamental issue here is one of direction, i.e policy transfer theories are problematized through a relational lens and then the ‘assemblage’ used to exemplify this more ‘complex’ connective tissue. This is in opposition to thinking cities and the process of spatial making as a practice through an ontological reconceptualization of the assemblage.

While it may not have the evocative terminology of relationality and globalisation on its side, Rose’s work is, I would argue, a much better basis upon which to approach a critical analysis

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of the way in which the establishment of urban planning ideas and models across the world, today, ride merely upon the back of myths (Lieto 2015). Laura Lieto’s critique of what she describes as a failure to account for “enduring power relations” (ibid.117) offers an additional insight into the problems with a desire for ‘global’ conceptualisations of policy and knowledge ‘circulation’. In her article, she focuses on the way myths of design planning from Europe arise in the Middle East drawing attention to the obvious differences not only in city contexts but in worldviews, meaning that simple narratives of transfer are impossible to define (Alizadeh 2012; Short 2014). Indeed, the Christianity-Islam boundary, whether it is in today’s ‘globalising’ world or during the scramble for Africa is impossible to transcend with narratives of ‘circulation’ without significant historical accountability of the role of ‘power’ as a concept in and of itself20_{. The notion that power has an ‘externality’ has its roots, quite obviously, in a} transcendental understanding of the world, in the belief that there is a space from which power is ‘grasped’. This, however, in discussions over the application of the ‘assemblage’ in urban studies, seems to be regularly ignored.

A debated example is helpful here. Based on a stinging critique of the work of geographer Colin McFarlane focusing on informal settlements in Sao Paulo and Mumbai, Brenner et al. (2011), seek to defend ‘critical urban theory’, by describing “McFarlane and several other assemblage urbanists” asengaging in “naïve objectivism” in their failure to problematize the primacy of ‘structures’. The mantle of responsibility in rebuffing these criticisms is then taken up by Ignacio Farías (2011). Summarising his defence through key misunderstandings (perhaps misrepresentations) made by Brenner et al. (2011), Farías (2011, p.366) highlights the divergent trajectory in the agendas being pursued by different modes of enquiry:

“…against this background, it becomes evident that stressing the underpinning logics, strategies and contradictions of capitalist urbanization does not really call into question the unity, coherence or objectivity of the real; on the contrary, it accentuates it. Consequently, if there is a ‘naïve objectivism’, this should be rather predicated of those perspectives that don’t engage in an ontological inquiry about the city”

20 _{This is something regularly glossed over by globalisation scholars who are persuaded to extend their empirical}

purview to the middle east by the bright lights and ‘western’ material forms that cities such as Dubai and Abu

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Farías argues that both the underlying conceptions of social organisation (assemblages v structures) and the definitive object of study (cities v capitalism driven urbanisation) are at odds with each other in these divergent approaches (Farías 2010). Farías’ argument, not too dissimilar to some of those raised in chapter four, is that capitalism needs to be decentred and situated as a part of the city assemblage rather than as the determinant factor in the production of the urban. Peck (2014:167) describes this argument as borne out of a “refusal of globalized over-determination and hierarchical interpretations of top-down power relations”. The assemblage’s ‘alternative ontology’ (Farías and Bender 2012), for the very reasons presented in this chapter, looks to distance itself from the way in which power has been theorised and used in the social sciences, i.e conflated with resources, presumed to be ‘held’, and generally stuck in an epoch characterised by a fragmented, ‘neoliberal’ sovereignty where power is simply passed from the state to other actors.