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Inside mobile urbanism: Cities and policy mobilities

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Inside mobile urbanism: cities and policy mobilities

Cristina Temenos

University of Manchester

Tom Baker

University of Auckland

Ian R. Cook

Northumbria University

To be published in 2019 in Schwanen, T. (ed.) Handbook of Urban Geography. Cheltenham:

Edward Elgar.
INTRODUCTION

In the southern suburbs of Marseille, by the Boulevard Michelet, is a 17 storey concrete

housing block. Opening in 1952, the block – like its architect, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret –

has had a significant influence on the form of post-war planning and architecture.

Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier, produced many spectacular plans throughout his

lifetime, and visited many cities in the process, but it was not until he was sixty years old

that he won his first major commission – to build the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille (Hall,

2014). Here he was able to showcase part of his utopian vision of the city.

Le Corbusier regularly framed the city as “a body in the last stages of a fatal disease –

its circulation clogged, its tissues dying of their own noxious wastes” (Fishman, 1977: 12).

Simultaneously inspired and disgusted by his adopted city of Paris – as well as being inspired

by numerous other architects and political ideologies – Le Corbusier argued that the only

way to save the city was to destroy it and start again. The rebuilt city would be centrally

planned, heavily centralised and densely populated. The apartment would be the mass-

produced standard unit of accommodation, with the city hosting much green space and

wide-open roads. The city would be modern, geometric, functional and efficient. In his 1933

plans for la Ville Radieuse (the Radiant City) – on which the Marseille development was

based – Le Corbusier’s city would be built around neighbourhoods known as unités for 2,700

residents, hosting a number of collective services such as cooking, cleaning and child care.

There would be little social segregation, with the size of accommodation meeting the needs

and size of the family rather than their ability to pay (Fishman, 1977).

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 With much of the radical politics stripped away, and far from being a fully formed

neighbourhood, the freestanding Unité d’Habitation embodied a number of design features

of the Radiant City model. When opened, it included 337 maisonettes, space for a shopping

centre on the eighth floor, and a rooftop featuring a paddling pool, playground and a

restaurant. Images of the development proliferated across the professional and popular

media, and it attracted intrigued visitors from France and beyond (Cook et al., 2015). Le

Corbusier also designed similar unités in France (Nantes, Briey and Firminy), in Berlin, and

was commissioned to design the Indian city of Chandigarh. Although he had few

commissions before he died in 1965, his model underpinned many of the high-rise social

housing developments in post-war Western Europe and beyond (Hall, 2014). Over the

decades, Le Corbusier’s ideas have been derided by many, and countless Corbusier-like

buildings have been demolished. Yet the imprint of his (dis)utopian vision of the city can still

be seen in many cities across the globe.

Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation symbolises a number of dualisms that define

contemporary cities and, more particularly, the policy ideas that work to govern and seek to

shape them. The first is that cities and urban policies are both local and global (the Unité

d’Habitation being both a local building as well as being a ‘demonstration project’ for a

global audience). Second, cities and urban policies are at the same time territorial and

relational (the Unité d’Habitation being a physical space or territory but also one that has

social relations with people and places in different parts of the world). Third, both cities and

urban policies embody fixity and mobility (with Le Corbusier fixing his ‘mobile’ ideas in

Marseille and other European cities). Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation is a concrete model

that has gained traction in cities throughout the world. It is the mobility of such a concept

3
and the ways in which it contributes to contemporary urbanism with which this chapter is

concerned.

In recent years, scholars have been particularly interested in capturing the

heterogeneous and qualitative experiences and effects of being ‘on the move’ (Cresswell,

2006; Urry, 2007; Adey et al., 2014). The 'mobility turn' as it has been dubbed, is concerned

with the physical movements, socio-cultural meanings, and political practices of

mobilization. For urban scholars more specifically, mobility has been a longstanding interest

– think, for instance, of the early work by the Chicago School which explored relationships

between immigration and the spatial forms of the city (e.g. Park and Burgess, 1967). In

recent years urban mobilities have captured the interest of a wide range of researchers;

geographers in particular have focused their attention on urban policy mobilities. This

emerging sub-field of urban scholarship examines the processes, practices and resources

brought together to construct, mobilize and territorialize policy knowledge (McCann, 2011;

Baker and Temenos, 2015). A central empirical concern for the policy mobilities literature

has been to understand the ways in which policy models (such as the Radiant City) and

policy actors (such as Le Corbusier) move between places, simultaneously shaping and being

shaped by the contexts through which they travel, aiming to understand the ways in which

urban policies—as a constellation of ideas, people, resources, techniques and

technologies—and their mobilities actively produce ‘the urban’.

This chapter explores ‘mobile urbanism’ through the lens of urban policy mobilities.

We discuss how geographers and other social scientists have sought to understand the

movement of policies between cities. In doing so, it returns to the dualisms outlined earlier

to highlight key aspects of urban policy mobility. The chapter then examines how mobile
4
policies are dependent on a range of related mobilities involving knowledge, people,

materials and politics. It concludes with a visit to Park Hill in Sheffield, England, a large Le

Corbusian-inspired post-war social housing development, recently redeveloped and

gentrified, in order to reaffirm the core ideas running through the urban policy mobilities

literature.

MOBILE URBAN POLICY

Geographers are not alone in studying the movement of policies between places (Cook,

2015). Indeed, they were somewhat late to the party, entering these debates in the early

2000s (e.g. Peck and Theodore, 2001; Ward, 2006; McCann, 2008). There is, however, a long

tradition in political science of exploring the diffusion of public policies (Walker, 1969),

lesson-drawing (Rose, 1991) and policy transfer (Dolowitz and Marsh, 2000). Galvanised by

the new mobilities turn and frustrated with the political science work’s often positivist

underpinnings and their restricted engagement with questions of politics and spatiality, a

broad range of social scientists, including geographers, planners, anthropologists and

others, have sought to rethink the movement and mutation of policies, ideas and expertise

(McCann and Ward, 2013; Peck and Theodore, 2015).

Policy mobilities scholars have approached the movement of policies between places

through the lens of social constructivism, mainly focusing on three inter-related issues. This

5
first is the social processes of constructing policy ideas, and the work that goes into their

creation, promotion, circulation, and re-embedding. Policy ideas ‘that work’ do not naturally

appear, nor are they automatically worthy of emulation by other policymakers and

practitioners; they must be conscientiously made and sold. Therefore, analytical attention

needs to be paid to the embodied social labour and the material and discursive practices

that shape and facilitate the circulation of policy (McCann, 2011; Peck and Theodore, 2015).

The second issue is that of movement and mutation. McCann (2011: 115) reasons that

“[p]olicies, models, and ideas are not moved around like gifts at a birthday party or like jars

on shelves, where the mobilization does not change the character and content of the

mobilized objects”. Policies do not move intact from “sites of invention to sites of

emulation” (Peck and Theodore, 2015: xxiv). Instead, policies mutate as they move.

The third issue is the co-construction of policy ideas and the landscapes through

which they travel. Geographers maintain that it is not simply policy ideas that mutate but

also the spatial contexts through which they move: “[p]olicies are not, after all, merely

transferred over space; their form and their effects are transformed by these journeys,

which also serve continuously to remake relational connections across an intensely

variegated and dynamic socioinstitutional landscape” (Peck and Theodore, 2015: 29,

emphasis in original). This contention—that policy and space are mutually constituted—has

particular relevance for urban geographers, who see urban policies as both arising from

particular spatial contexts and remaking those contexts.

Now that we have established the three central issues that underpin the social

constructivist approach to policy mobilities, it is useful to reflect further on the three

dualisms that we explored the Unité d’Habitation through in the introduction: local/global,
6
fixity/mobility, and territoriality/relationality. This time we will relate them explicitly to the

mobilisation of policy through a social constructivist lens. Beginning with the local/global

dualism, urban policies are persistently local in many respects, but never purely local.

Policies are learned, formulated and implemented within an increasingly global context

“characterized by the intensified and instantaneous connectivity of sites, channels, arenas,

and nodes of policy development, evolution, and reproduction” (Peck and Theodore, 2015:

223). Thinking both globally and locally is imperative when analysing mobile policies. But

rather than treat the global and local as somehow separate or supplemental to one another,

researchers have positioned local and global as intermingled, seeking to problematize “the

inherent tensions between local specificity and global interconnectedness, and the

continuous process of embedding and disembedding, (mis)translation and mutation that

this entails” (ibid. xxviii).

This leads us to the dualism of fixity and mobility. Urban policy mobilities scholars

have regularly issued ontological warnings to avoid fetishizing the mobility of urban policy

as unfettered and untethered. Instead, the mobility of urban policies involves aspects of

immobility and fixity. As McCann and Ward (2015: 829) point out: “even within the most

‘mobile’ of policies there are elements of immobility, not least the institutional and physical

infrastructures through which they travel and are conditioned … Furthermore, since policies

do not move fully formed from place to place, some parts move while others prove less

mobile and remain fixed in place”. Those that remain fixed can refer to material forms such

as Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation or more conceptual elements such as legacies that

specific policies have developed and are tied to specific places. Those which remain can also

be aspects of policy that do not work elsewhere as they have been developed for a specific

7
locality. Recent work has explored the lack of mobility displayed by certain policies and the

difficulties and resistances associated with emulating policies elsewhere (e.g. McLean and

Borén, 2015; Wells, 2014).

Moving onto the third dualism – territoriality/relationality – urban policy mobility is

both a territorial and relational phenomenon. Massey (2011) argues that the territorial

qualities we tend to recognise in cities (e.g. institutions, streetscapes, ways of life) should be

understood as the outcome of many relations that extend within and beyond any particular

city. The city, for Massey, is understood as “a constellation of processes rather than a thing”

(Massey, 2005: 141). Allen and Cochrane (2007) extend this notion, claiming that while

urban governance and urban policy are always territorial, they are never exclusively so.

Urban policy-making is also composed of various 'elsewheres'. Taking on board such insights

means approaching the mobility of urban policy as both relational (displaying connections to

various sites of exchange and implementation) and territorially ‘placed’ (acquiring meaning

and legitimacy in territorially-embedded contexts).

The next section takes the fixity/mobility dualism further by considering what exactly

is mobile about urban policy mobilities. It outlines four elements of mobility that accompany

and make possible the mobility of urban policies: knowledge, people, materials and politics.

MOBILE KNOWLEDGE, PEOPLE, MATERIALS AND POLITICS

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If we consider urban policy only in its narrowest sense, as a set of prescriptions relating to

the governance of cities, then studying the mobility of urban policy might well become a

fairly straightforward task of figuring out where and when certain prescriptions were

adopted. This understanding would spectacularly underestimate and misinterpret what

urban policy mobilities entail and, more particularly, it would miss most of what is ‘mobile’

about urban policy. In fact, the appearance of a policy idea in multiple jurisdictions is merely

where investigation begins. It is the initial clue, or the visible tip of an otherwise large

iceberg. What lies below is a series of related mobilities involving knowledge, people,

materials and politics, each of which we now discuss (see table one).

Table 1: Elements of mobile policy: Some examples

Knowledge People Materials Politics

Expert knowledge, Bureaucrats, PowerPoints, Political economic

local Knowledge politicians, activists, reports, conditions, policy
lobbyists, service spreadsheets, advocacy, activism
managers; Global speech transcripts,
Intelligence Corps, maps, visualizations
architects,
designers,
consultants

First, the mobility of urban policy would be impossible without the mobility of

knowledge. Although policy decisions get made based on the accounts of various actors

with various sources of knowledge, expert knowledge is particularly powerful. It refers to

“specialist knowledge that cannot be adjudicated on its own terms by actors from outside

9
the community [of recognised experts]” (Prince, 2010: 876). Expert knowledge is often seen

as globally mobile knowledge because there is often the "perception that local expertise is

lacking and/or that a global approach is needed" (Rapoport, 2015a: 112). Such globally

mobile expert knowledge is however always mediated through relationships with local

practitioners and local experts (Robinson, 2015). The power of expert knowledge varies

depending on the political, geographical and historical contexts in which certain experts and

forms of expertise are positioned. For instance, calculative forms of expertise, which involve

claims based on quantification and measurement, are increasingly important to government

decision-making, especially in contexts where evidence-based policy is idealised. But this

was not always the case, and it may not be the case in the future. The status and

effectiveness of expert knowledge differs depending on the time and place in which it is

located.

Another powerful form of mobile knowledge relates to modelling. Policy models are

often informed by expert knowledge but are distinguishable insofar as they contain a

specific combination of features or a programmatic philosophy. Policy models are made

with an explicit attention to their mobility (McCann, 2011). They are 'flat-packaged' (Allen

and Cochrane, 2007) in order to be implemented with supposedly similar outcomes despite

territorial differences (see also Peck and Theodore, 2015; Temenos and McCann, 2013). On

one hand, models are mobile because they are framed as models for other places. On the

other hand, policy models are made mobile through the codification and packaging of

ostensibly reproducible features. Globally engaged policy makers, think tanks, design firms

and other actors aim to provide proven solutions, models that 'work', across a variety of

10
places. However, it is important to consider that in order for models to be mobilized, they

must also have a receptive local audience (Robinson, 2015).

The ways in which models are adopted, implemented, and shape the formation of

urban spaces often have as much to do with local knowledge as it does with mobile expert

knowledge. As Robinson (2015: 832) reminds us: "[p]olicy ideas might have wider

circulations and histories, but the relevant histories and processes by which they come to

policymakers’ attention might be entirely localized". She goes on to caution that attention

to expert mobile knowledge without attention to local knowledges produce "the possibility

of incapacitating local policy expertise through the prolific circulation of good-practice

examples and policy ideas by relatively powerful agents" (ibid: 833). Attention to such

arguments highlights the necessity of unpacking the value attributed to globalized, expert

knowledge and the erasure of local expertise and innovation, particularly in less-than-global,

or 'ordinary' cities.

The second element of the mobility of urban policy is strongly related to the

practices of mobile people. Urban policy-making requires a diverse cast of actors. And

despite information and communications technologies having brought people and places

closer together, there remains a need for face-to-face encounter and shared experience

through events such as conferences and study tours. Examining the role of conferences in

the spread of Business Improvement District models, Cook and Ward (2012: 141) note that

these events offer “opportunities for policy makers and practitioners to compare, evaluate,

judge, learn, and to situate their city in relation to others”. All types of policy actors —

including bureaucrats, activists and social service managers — are ‘mobile actors’ at times.

11
Temenos (2016), meanwhile, examines how conferences offer opportunities to educate

attendees about apparently innovative local approaches, and can be used strategically to

advance local political agendas drawing public attention to problems and grievances. By

temporarily convening a group of mobile people in one place, conferences are 'ephemeral

fixtures' in the landscape of urban policy making (ibid). Another type of event involving

mobile people is policy tourism. This involves policy actors visiting different places on 'study

tours' for the purposes of experiencing and learning about past, present or forthcoming

policies and practices. Like conferences, study tours result from the continuing demand for

face-to-face interaction as well as a desire to see and experience places in transition and

policies ‘in action’ (Cook et al., 2015; González, 2011; Wood, 2014). Likewise, conferences

and study tours are selective in the ways places and policies are presented to, and discussed

with, audience members or delegates.

While the mobility of urban policy and the mobility of people are closely related,

policy actors are not equally mobile. Stratification exists between locally-tethered actors,

who lack the economic and reputational resources to visit and learn from places elsewhere,

or promote their ideas to distant audiences, and a cast of mobile or even hyper-mobile

actors. Tracing the influence of a number of architects, planners and engineers constituting

the ‘global intelligence corps’, Rapoport (2015a) shows the mobilities of certain people

make a significant difference to the mobile capacity of certain policy ideas. By virtue of their

global presence, such actors are able to authoritatively frame urban problems and harness a

diverse but carefully curated range of ‘local’ lessons as solutions. This puts them in the

enviable and privileged position of being able to steer urban agendas, even if local

authorities and actors have the last say on which policy ideas are implemented.

12
 Third, the mobility of urban policy is sustained by the mobility of materials. Although

urban policy ideas are often mobilised through embodied interactions between mobile

people, these interactions are informed, even prefigured, by various kinds of materials

which circulate through virtual and physical spaces. As McCann (2008: 890) points out,

materials such as reports, spreadsheets, speech transcripts and maps have their own

complex itineraries: they get “passed around at conferences and meetings, move[d] from

place to place on laptop hard drives or other electronic storage devises, … transferred

electronically … and are repeatedly the topic of discussion among a broad range of urban

policy actors—from politicians, to policy professionals, to political activists and journalists”.

Materials, in a sense, are productive: they spur conversations, inform ways of thinking and,

in turn, shape the intentionality of policy actors.

Images also function as mobile materials, particularly in the realm of urban policy

and development where seductive images of urban modernity circulate widely. Rapoport

(2015b: 312) demonstrates how visual images act as powerful educational resources

because of their ability to redirect peoples’ thinking “from the realm of the abstract to that

of the lived and experienced”, but stresses that imagery is far from being a neutral window

onto the world. Remarking on stylised depictions of urban redevelopment, which her

respondents referred to as ‘cappuccino pictures’, Rapoport (ibid: 321) notes that in such

images, “the sun is always shining and children are always playing. The more negative

features of urban life, such as traffic congestion and pollution, are entirely absent.”

Finally, the mobility of urban policy is inseparable from mobile forms of politics.

When we take ‘politics’ to reflect ideological contests over the appropriate forms and

functions of the state, and ‘policy’ as the means by which those forms and functions are
13
realised, it follows that policy and politics are closely intertwined. If policies are vehicles for

the achievement of political-ideological projects, then mobile policies signify the existence

of mobile political-ideological projects. One of the primary reasons that geographers are

interested in the mobility of policy is because it allows them to better understand the way

political-ideological projects such as roll-back welfare reform spread, become hegemonic

and in doing so structure the scope of the possible.

Of course, the type of political-ideological projects that assume hegemonic status

will vary historically and geographically, and will involve negotiation and contestation. For

example, in Anglo-American cities, where neoliberal ideology and its subsequent policy

projects has experienced a 30-year ascendency and has become dominant to varying

degrees, policy ideas that go with the grain of established neoliberal preferences (i.e.

market allocation, minimal government spending, self-reliance) have a significantly greater

chance of uptake than those that do not. In previous historical periods, however, hegemonic

political projects based on progressive and socialist ideologies supported the mobility of

different kinds of urban policies in many cities of the global North (Clarke, 2012; Cook et al.,

2014).

Reflecting on the political-ideological conditions structuring policy mobility in cities

of the global South, Phelps et al. (2014) explain how progressive-developmental political

projects often set the terms on which policy decisions are made. This account joins urban

policy mobility research with broader debates about the applicability of theoretical

templates tending to originate from cities of the global North. Kate Swanson's (2014) study

of the mobilization of zero-tolerance policing in Latin America and Tarini Bedi's (2016)

examination of cultural and political change accompanying the importation of the Singapore
14
model of taxi transport in Mumbai have urged scholars to appreciate that the mobility of

urban policies reflects many different political-ideological projects that are in-the-making.

This pluralism constitutes the basis for debates arising within policy mobilities, and shapes

the current and future research agenda.

CRITIQUES AND FUTURES

While there has been a noticeable degree of consensus within policy mobilities research, it

is important to highlight some of the critiques within the literature. Critique has generally

come from those working within, or close to, the policy mobilities approach – although see

Marsh and Evans’ (2012) critique from a political science perspective and McCann and

Ward’s (2013) response. Early critiques centred on the tendency for scholars to (a) focus on

neoliberal policies and privilege empirical and theoretical orientations towards cities in the

global North (Bunnell, 2013); (b) display a presentist outlook (Jacobs, 2012); and (c) take

unreflexive methodological stances on a new theoretical approach (Harris and Moore,

2013).

As the literature has matured, it has begun to respond to each of these criticisms (cf.

Kuus, 2015; Temenos and Baker, 2015). On the centrality of neoliberalism and the global

North, Cohen (2015) and Söderström and Geertman (2013), for example, have respectively

written about the importance of understanding ad hoc networks and less-than-neoliberal

planning practices for evaluating geographies of global urban development. Both studies

argue that it is specifically a focus in Southeast Asian cities that have led to such conceptual
15
insights. A general predisposition towards the neoliberal present in the global North may

still dominate current research but it is now one (valuable) orientation among many in the

literature. With regard to the critique of presentism, Barber (2013), Cook et al. (2015), and

Quark (2013) among others, have enthusiastically engaged in rich historical studies of

pathways, conditions, and mutations of policies as they are mobilized. These interventions

have quashed any notion that the mobility of policy knowledge is somehow specific to the

present.

A number of methodological papers have emerged, notably a special issue of

Environment and Planning A convened by Cochrane and Ward (2012 vol 44,1). There is no

methodological monopoly when it comes to policy mobility research. Indeed, studying

mobile policies has been approached from ethnographic (Roy, 2012), comparative

(Robinson, 2015; Temenos, 2016), tracery (Cook et al., 2015; McCann and Ward, 2011) and

assemblage (Baker and McGuirk, 2016) approaches, among others. They cater to different

empirical circumstances, different conceptualisations of policy (and of cities), different

epistemologies, and different styles of ‘research politics’.

One of the more prominent approaches has been to 'follow the policy' as it moves

across global landscapes. Peck and Theodore (2015) provide what is perhaps the most

comprehensive account of what this approach means for researchers, working across cities

in the global North and global South, traveling to conferences, think tank headquarters, and

sites of (in this case welfare service) operations. ‘Following the policy’ encompasses

following various policy elements such as people, policies and places (McCann and Ward,

2011). Yet, following such things takes both time and substantial resources. Bok (2014)

provides an insightful discussion on how to manage challenges to time, resources, and

16
access to research informants — challenges that all researchers face at one point or another

— while being able to produce a richly detailed account of policy mobility. In so doing, Bok

advocates for greater attention to discourse and document analysis. Likewise, Baker and

McGuirk (2016) argue that documents act “as texts that reveal particular ways of thinking

and acting… whose itineraries and effects can be apprehended by following their ‘traces’ in

different contexts.” This type of understanding can be found in studies of contemporary

policy mobilization, and studies that use archival material to investigate previous historical

periods (Clarke, 2012, Cook et al., 2015).

So where next for the studies of urban policy mobilities? This could be a very long list

of avenues for future research but we restrict ourselves to four. The first is to expand the

repertoire of policies and cities documented in the literature in order to avoid seeing all

examples of urban policy mobility through the prism of Anglo-American experiences. This

would put scholars in a better position to differentiate what is specific and what is general

about processes of urban policy mobility. The second is to conceptualise policies and cities

as being simultaneously local/global, fixed/mobile, territorial/relational as well as thinking

about the movement of policies as being accompanied by a series of related mobilities

involving knowledge, people, materials and politics. The third is to think more critically

about notions and discourses of ‘success’ and ‘failure’ that shape policy development and

circulation. Finally, it is important to engage with other conceptual questions in the field of

urban studies. For example, Affolderbach and Schulz (2015) note that there have been many

calls for a stronger conversation between policy mobilities and science and technology

studies, yet few have come to fruition (see also Clarke, 2012). Throughout such a future

17
research agenda, we argue that it is essential to keep in the forefront the question of how

policy mobillity is imbricated into the socio-spatial configurations of cities and urban life.

CONCLUSION

We opened this chapter with a vignette of Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseille and

we close it with a brief account of another post-war development, Park Hill in Sheffield.

Designed by Ivor Smith and Jack Lynn and commissioned and built by Sheffield City Council,

Park Hill was built to rehouse families living in the city’s slums. Opening nine years after the

Unité d’Habitation and perched on a hillside next to Sheffield city centre, the

development—reaching 13 storeys at its highest point—looks like a series of snake-like

buildings joined together with 3.5 metres-wide elevated walkways. Initially comprised of

955 dwellings (both apartments and maisonettes) as well as shops, pubs and other facilities,

Park Hill would attract considerable media attention and host numerous ‘policy tourists’.

While Park Hill is a much larger development than the Unité d’Habitation, the two

display a striking physical resemblance, particularly in their concentric structure and use of

colourful balconies. Indeed, Smith and Lynn were open about their admiration for Le

Corbusier’s ideas and the Unité d’Habitation, which they visited (‘Streets in the Sky’, 2009).

Yet, they were also influenced by two other architects, Alison and Peter Smithson, who

were also enthusiasts of Le Corbusier. In their uncommissioned plans for the Golden Lane

development in London, the Smithsons drew on the Unité d’Habitation’s interior street and

18
moved them to the outside the building – streets in the sky – an idea emulated by Smith and

Lynn for Park Hill, and subsequently by many other architects (Hollow, 2010).

While the streets in the sky remain, today Park Hill is being redeveloped. Beginning

in the late 2000s, the redevelopment is led by the private developers Urban Splash, known

for ‘reimagining’ old inner city buildings in other UK cities. The redevelopment has stalled

somewhat with only one building having been redeveloped thus far (see Figure 1). All

buildings in Park Hill are due to retain their concentric structure and the walkways but now

features chic interiors, vibrant external colours and extensive window space. The most

significant change however has been the occupants: out go the remaining tenants who have

been rehoused elsewhere, in comes a ‘mixed community’ according to the developers,

entering the redeveloped, overwhelmingly private accommodation alongside reduced social

housing and business space.

19
Figure 1: Park Hill in 2016 (with a renovated block on the left adjoined to an evocated block

awaiting renovation on the right)

Photo Credit: Author IR Cook 2016

The example of Park Hill speaks directly to the issues of mobile urbanism and, in

particular, policy mobilities. It is a development in which thousands of people have moved

in and out of over the years, and a place that is fixed, territorial and local as well as mobile,

relational and global. Park Hill’s construction and recent reconstruction have involved

drawing on policies – as well as people, knowledge, materials and politics – from places

elsewhere. Yet its links to places elsewhere are multiple, messy and evolving. For instance,

20
the initial construction was much more than a simple policy transfer from Marseille to

Sheffield. It is also a building that has changed over time and its relations with Sheffield and

places elsewhere have morphed too. This speaks to Peck and Theodore’s (2015) notion that

policy models and their emulators are always hybrids and continually evolving. Both Park

Hill and the Unité d’Habitation are entities that are better understood through the lens of

urban policy mobilities. Like so many other aspects of urban life and urban policy though,

they also require further academic investigation and such studies are needed to help refine

our empirical and conceptual knowledge of mobile urbanism and policy mobilities.

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