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The widespread adoption of BRT in South Africa denotes a process of “policy mobilities” in which localities create, circulate and adopt global innovation (McCann 2011b; McCann and Ward 2011). How Cities Learn reveals that policy mobilities is not only the “purposeful, repetitive, programmable sequence of exchange and interaction between physically disjointed positions held by social actors in the economic, political, and symbolic structures of society” (Castells 1996: 442), but also a process of dialogue and debate which involves power and personalities. These practices, however, have proven difficult to research since the exchanges rarely lead directly to uptake. Previous studies have traced the movement of knowledge through various “coordination tools” (McFarlane 2011b: 364), which include consultancies (Rapoport and Hult 2017; Wood 2019b), conferences (Cook and Ward 2012; Temenos 2016), study tours (Montero 2016; Ward 2011; Wood 2014a), technology (Rapoport 2015), and workshops (Wood 2014b); and others have followed the transnational advocacy groups (Stone 2002) and learning organizations (Wood 2019c) that package, frame and legitimize global circulation (Theodore and Peck 2011). Scholars tend to conclude that learning emerges through various voices, interests and expectations, translating and coordinating a multitude of information, including existing knowledge, across asymmetrical power structures and creating possibilities from the impossible (McFarlane 2011a). How Cities Learn builds from this scholarship by outlining a conceptual and practical analysis of policy mobilities that attends to the plethora of ordinary practices – be it through engagements with fellow practitioners, with their toolbox of material solutions, or after a particular moment of discovery – that form the assemblages of learning.

It is along this line of inquiry that How Cities Learn builds upon and extends the thinking of urban scholars, first by bringing concerns of power into question, and second by problematizing notions of governance at-a-distance. Certainly policy mobilities arguments have provided evidence that power is now disseminated across a host of diverse agents and agencies. In this book, I ground policy mobilities within the adopting locality so as to suggest that power is always exercised in situ, although in the case of policy mobilities it often seems as if power is furthered by external authorities. Indeed, policy mobilities is a practice of both embracing extra-territorial thinking, but equally so a means through which local actors exploit international advocates and their policy models to justify preordained decisions, which might otherwise be resisted by local politics. Thus policy mobilities, though global in nature, is an inherently local process, one that is best exposed by scrutinizing the actors and their actions within the adopting locality, and then tracing back through their rationale for implementing a policy, product or practice also found elsewhere.

Accordingly, I employ the process of “tracing” to better understand policy mobilities (Wood 2020). This approach draws on Robinson’s three genetic and generative approaches to comparative urbanism: “composing” – that is examining the specific similarities and dissimilarities within a range of instances; “launching” – that is starting from anywhere and then putting the analysis to work anywhere; and “tracing” – that is following (i.e. the genetic component) and comparing (i.e. the generative component) the connections themselves. It involves outlining the connections and their influence on the comparable instances (McCann 2011b; Ward 2006), as well as comparing cities and their relationships themselves (Myers 2014; Söderström 2014). This approach allows us to trace historical events and consider their interrelated effects on the urban (Cook et al. 2014a; Wood 2015a); it enables us to see the urban realm as an assemblage of the here-and-there (McCann and Ward 2011); and it supports further consideration of the interrelatedness between cities within this stretched and extended moment of urbanization (Roy and Ong 2011). This means not only tracing that which brings cities into conversation with one another (i.e. the presence of comparativism) but also that which does not bring cities into conversation (i.e. the absence of comparativism), as well as the inherent subjectivity and slipperiness of those relations.

This chapter introduces the multidisciplinary approach of the policy mobilities literature and explores the research thematically, in the process also setting up a structure for the remainder of the book. First, I question the role of the innovation itself in attracting attention from the adopting communities – that is how and why are certain mobile ideas attractive to importing localities, and is there an agency inherent to certain policy models? Second, I refocus on the policy actors assembling, mobilizing and adopting innovation, to draw attention to their role both individually and within networks in the adoption of circulated forms of knowledge. Third, I concentrate on cities as institutions and specifically the way in which wider municipal-level decisions and relationships influence adoption procedures. Fourth, the argument turns towards temporality, to understand the way in which previous experience with similar forms of knowledge enables a more rapid adoption when the importing locality is ready. These discussions inform the key findings of this book.