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How Cities Learn is organized into seven chapters including this introduction. Chapter 2, “Geographies of knowledge”, provides the analytical scaffolding for this book. It introduces the policy mobilities framework which will be used to explain the multiple and complex relations between actors, which elevate the achievements of particular policies and bring certain cities into conversation with one another, while pushing other ideas, policymakers and places further apart.

Chapter 3, “Translating BRT to South Africa”, traces the global geography of BRT to understand what features attracted South African policymakers and, in so doing, reflects on the theoretical notion of best practice policy models and their process of mobilization, mutation and translation. Moving away from the assumption that BRT is merely a technological template for stations and busways, this chapter reveals that the Bogotá model was not replicated in South African cities but rather that a variation, which focused on the transformation of the informal transit system, emerged. This suggests that policy models are polysemic, and rather than being duplicated they are modified and mutated to suit the needs of each importing jurisdiction. The adoption of best practice therefore takes place only when aspects of the circulating notion combine with underlying conditions, thereby normalizing the particular technical arrangements and social rationalities for adoption.

Chapter 4, “Actors and associations circulating BRT”, focuses on the urban planning professionals, practitioners and politicians introducing, circulating and managing the adoption of BRT. While some are instrumental in planting ideas that may lie dormant for some time, others engage in their prospective evaluation and actively stimulate their application. International policy actors cannot simultaneously create, impart, mobilize, and approve global policy models. Instead, it is the local (South African) policy actors that localize international best practice. Their interactions with internationals legitimize global policy by giving it both local and transnational salience. This examination of the policy actors expands our understanding of the varied direction, speed and influence of global and local influences shaping the contemporary city.

Chapter 5, “The local politics of BRT”, analyzes the international, national and local connections and disconnections between localities that influenced its adoption. At the international scale, this chapter reveals a deliberate preference to learn from Bogotá rather than a multiplicity of South American cities who also implemented BRT. This same enthusiasm for south–south exchanges was also used to disregard the experiences of African and Indian cities. Within South Africa, this chapter explores the competitive political and technical relationships between cities that influenced the adoption of BRT. This multi-scalar analysis of the politics of BRT explains the process by which policy and policy actors connect and disconnect topographically and topologically.

Chapter 6, “Repetitive processes of BRT”, situates BRT adoption within a longer history of South African transportation planning. It exposes previous involvements with BRT-like interventions that did not progress. This chapter contests the fast policy literature, which identifies the introduction of prefabricated best practice policies as part of the shortening of the policymaking cycles. Rather it suggests that there are multiple temporalities through which circulated policies emerge and remerge before adoption, and that often without these multiple attempts, policy circulation would not be effective. BRT learning is therefore gradual, repetitive and at times delayed.

Chapter 7, “Conclusion”, outlines the book’s main theoretical arguments, in particular answering how and why cities adopt circulated forms of knowledge. Here, I argue that policy mobilities is a process of learning and understanding, adoption and adaption, competition and collaboration, facilitated by local South African policy actors and their relations with urban elsewheres. In concluding, How Cities Learn explores the impact of BRT on the socio-spatial landscape of the South African city, and situates this study within the wider process of post-apartheid transformation.