New Urban Sustainability Policies: Deleuze and Local Innovation Versus Policy Mobility

Abstract

Recent scholarship on how cities come to adopt new policies has focused on the notion of mobile policy. This incorporates the idea that policy actors create mental maps of ‘ best cities ’ (McCann & Ward, 2011, xiv) or “ powerful centres ” (Peck & Theodore, 2015, 23) for the latest policies to inform future strategies, which are then converted into locally appropriate solutions. This scholarship recognises that policies thus identi fi ed will need to be adjusted to make them work in new locations (McCann & Ward, 2011, xiv). The overall picture is of an urban policy landscape of sporadic new policies that offer new approaches to urban problems and that are then picked up by cities around the globe and incorporated in their strategies. This scholarship suggests that most really innovative urban policies are borrowed by cities rather than developed locally across a range of urban areas. Mobile policies have assumed promin-ence in an era of heightened inter-city competition amidst social and environmental challenges. The mobility of policies is further intensi fi ed through the existence of international networks of scholars and policy-makers that transmit knowledge of initiatives that have proven successful somewhere in meeting these challenges. Nevertheless, existing scholarship does not adequately interrogate the ways in which innovative new urban policies are generated in the fi rst place. What kinds of factors should we look for to explain the emergence of such policies? Are there certain kinds of policy challenges that are less susceptible to being adopted from somewhere else and that are more likely to need local innovation? This short paper attempts to open debate on these questions. In doing so, we draw on a recent survey of innovative urban sustainability policies implemented across the globe after developing insights suggested by the theoretical concepts of Deleuze. The particular Deleuzian concepts we draw on start with the notion of the rhizome, and the way it can be used to understand how new policies emerge. Next, Deleuze ’ s emphasis on the importance of context and contingency is used in conjunction with his concept of multiplicity to understand the characteristics that new policies might have. In addition, Deleuze ’ s concept of the fold