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McCann, Eugene and Kevin Ward “Relationality/ territoriality: Toward…
The authors?
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Kevin Ward is a professor of human geography and a director of Manchester Urban Institute, his focus is on the financing and governance of cities.
What is a policy?
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Main characteristics?
In motion & relational
The relationality brings some cities closer together and other further apart, thus, leading to clusetring and hierarchy.
The high mobility is visible because of the "fast policy transfer" organised by "transfer agents". The welfare and the creative cities policies are the ones diffusing with the fastest speed at the moment.
Local, grounded & territorial
There are a lot of models that are working for different cities and all of them are contingent on the historical-geographical circumstances of that city and its relationship with other regional and national forms of decision-making.
Policies are teritorial because they are tied up with a whole set of locally dependent interests like growth coalitions.
When a global policy is being adapted it should be translated and adjusted for the needs of the locality.
Why is this important?
(1) The exploration of the main tension between the relational and the territorial, the global and the local aspects of policy-making, e.g. its "local globalness", will help the understanding of the urban-global relations, thus, it will help conceptualisation.
Avoid elitism and functionalism - policies should be designed by both policy-makers and policy researchers.
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(2) Currently, there is a convergence of thought and lack of empirical research on the topic. If this situation is not criticised how can the conceptualisation of mobility policy be studied? There is a lot of attention for the economic development and the new urban policies, but more attention should target the HOW - through what practices, where, when, and by whom - urban-policies are produced in the global-relational context.
Main critiques?
The authors are advocating for a framework that includes a broader understanding of "transfer agents", takes seriously the "inter-urban policy transfer" that links cities across national boundaries, and understands transfer as a socio-spatial process in which policies are subject to change as they are moved.
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