Book Review: “Mobile Urbanism : Cities And Policymaking In The Global Age”
I ’d like to mention about this book because I believe that understanding the urban policy-making process and how they become local while they spread around the world can be helpful to analyse the city we live in. This book has so much perspective on urban mobility and explains many of the concepts that help this situation. BID, damage reduction, creative growth just one of these concepts. Although it was published in 2011, we can say that the book is still up to date. McCann and Ward explain mobile urbanism and a policy-making process with the examples of various cities.
If you are wondering about the answers to the following questions like me, you can find it in the book.
-How the innately territorializing properties of urban politics and its place-based legacies interact to produce contingent urban policy assemblages?
-How urban policy knowledge is inserted into, and mobilized through, global circuits?
-What is the meaning of mobile urbanism? What is the impact of mobile urbanism on globalization?
-How knowledge and power flow between places and impact cities worldwide?
-What is the contribution of policy making to city management processes?
-Are policy-making processes sufficient to provide justice to city management processes?
-What is the importance of justice and locality issues on globalization?
-How different cities create policy based on practices first instituted elsewhere?
-Mobilization of labor and production with the effect of globalization; How did it affect cities physically, economically and socially?
The book consists of 6 chapters and the authors focus on 6 different elements of policymaking and mobility. However, all chapters serve the same main subject. McCann and Ward examine different case areas with different scales to tell connections between mobile policies and relational-regional geographies.
Understanding the mobile urbanism concept quite important to grasp up-to-date global-urban conditions. Mobile urbanism focuses on policy mobility and its power of creating and sculpting a place. In the beginning, authorized institutions or people create some policies for solving one specific problem or improving some situation. Then these policies transferred to the cities that want to achieve the same goal.
One of the examples of these processes is the birth and transfer of creative growth policy. This policy aimed to attract the creative class. In a knowledge-oriented field, it plays a significant role in the urban economy. London was cited by Jamie Peck as one of the first examples of developing this policy. Some arrangements have been made to attract these particular well-educated classes in London. As a result, it is seen that the city, which holds the target class in, provides growth. Thus the competition between cities started to attract the attention of the creative classes, and they are still trying to find the best way.
In addition, there are many examples of creative growth policy mobilization in the book. Throughout history, also health policies were transferred between regions to protect city dwellers from infectious diseases. This is easy to understand because there is no need to travel in time. Because we had a chance to experience this in the covid 19 period. Cities see and learn from each other, and share their experiences and disease prevention policies.
Besides that globalization is about a connected world and mobile urbanism contributes to this connection. The authors explain how mobile urbanism helps globalization in various examples. They mention different policies from drug policy to urban management. Regions shares their knowledge with each other sometimes it requires the prisoner region. In this way, borders disappear from the world and it helps to globalization.
There is some institutions and actors that transfer policy. There also specifies a range of different types of transfer like voluntary, coerced. McCann mentions there are 3 limits about policy transfer and determining how transfer begin and be successful. First transfer agents typologies undefined. Second The focus is only on national and international transfers, ignoring interactions between cities in different countries .And lastly It assumes that policies are being transferred securely from one place to another.
Furthermore, McCann believes that the mobility of contemporary policies should be a subject to work on, even for countries that are not the richest. Existing literature states that it has an important place in the elite in shaping policies and mobilizing them around the world. Actors of various scales, business coalitions, professional organizations, transnational institutions, think tanks and consultants contribute to policy transfer.
To summarize, cities interact with each other in economic and political processes. This interaction creates relation between them. McCann and Ward points that f urban policy making is an assessment of both “regional” and “relational” geographies. Cities get involved in each other’s future.
