Geography Working papers
This Working Paper is part of the Imagining Urban Futures Programme series.
‘Policies in motion’, urban management and state restructuring: the trans-local expansion of Business Improvement Districts
Kevin Ward
Abstract
This paper examines the ways in which Business Improvement Districts are being
introduced into UK cities. In advancing this analysis, the focus here is on the means
through which one or two Manhattan Business Improvement Districts have been
constructed as ‘models’ of urban management, taken out of their particular
local/regional and national contexts and introduced into a diverse set of local
political economic contexts in UK cities and towns. Examining the way Business
Improvement Districts have become a policy in motion, the paper sketches out the
emergence of entrepreneurial urban governance arrangements in the UK as part of
the state’s changing spatiality in the industrialized economies of Western Europe and
North America. I argue that these changes make UK cities and towns increasingly
receptive to the Business Improvement District model of downtown management.
Seeking to move beyond the sometimes rather one-sided representations of policies
that find themselves on the move, the paper seeks to connect the ‘exporting’ and ‘importing’ zones of policy transfer, arguing for an open and permeable
conceptualisation of these places. It draws on work in Manhattan, New York to
unpack the nature of the political-economic relations that Business Improvement
Districts were part of, before moving on to examine the dynamics of its policytransfer
and the early days of the introduction of this downtown ‘model’ into UK
cities.
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