In recent decades, the circulation of urban knowledge, models, and policies has intensified. Advances in information and communication technologies, along with the phenomena of decentralization, democratization, and neoliberalization of the state, have accelerated and increased the historical process of unequal circulation of knowledge and public policies promoted by financial, international, and philanthropic organizations, investors, political actors, city networks, and transnational publishing industries (Montero, 2019). However, academic approaches continue to focus on the circulation of urban policies in a north-north or north-south direction.

Although sometimes accompanied by rhetoric of novelty, these processes are not new (Delgadillo, 2014; Jajamovich, 2017; Novick, 2009). In Latin America, over time, rulers and elites have selectively and strategically adopted (fragments of) urban policies originating in other regions to beautify cities, address urban problems, and/or legitimize particular urban policies and strategies. Since the second half of the 19th century, Latin American architects, urban planners, and urban engineers have traveled to study in Europe and, later, in the United States. Likewise, European and North American experts have traveled throughout the region on various occasions, providing consulting and advisory services, and teaching courses and giving lectures (Almandoz, 2002).

The circulation of knowledge, expertise, and urban policies has never been a unidirectional or simple process (González, 2011; Jajamovich, 2018). Multiple local aspirations are often fueled by diverse external motivations. It is not simply a matter of importing pre-established concepts and knowledge, but rather of processes that involve selective adaptation to specific places and the reinvention of these paradigms and knowledge within specific sites and conditions. In other words, policies evolve as they circulate (Peck and Theodore, 2015).

Historically, urban concepts, paradigms, and theories that emerge in a specific territory and time period detach themselves from their places and circulate throughout the world. Similarly, urban policies, which have their own temporality and attempt to confront challenges and problems rooted in specific territories, travel unevenly through complex processes in geographies very different from their place of origin. However, not all urban policy or all knowledge about the city becomes mobile and circulating, as there are power differences in access to networks and among the political actors who guide, delimit, and enable certain policy flows, while simultaneously preventing others (Jajamovich, 2017).

Although it is sometimes presented in a technocratic language marked by allusions to best practices (Sánchez and Moura, 2005), the circulation and diffusion of urban policies are political processes. Thus, some policies become successful and dynamic while others are doomed to failure and remain static (Ward, 2006). Furthermore, the same urban policy circulates differently depending on where and among whom it is disseminated.

Although still uneven, in recent decades the circulation of urban theories and policies has not only occurred in a north-north or north-south direction, but also south-south and even south-north direction. Thus, some Latin American urban policies, such as the Metrobus in Curitiba and the Metrocable in Medellín, have been replicated in numerous Latin American cities; Participatory Budgeting, which originated in Brazil, is even being implemented in Catalan municipalities (Delgadillo, 2014; Porto de Oliveira, 2017). In turn, Latin American contributions to theories of urban informality have been very useful for addressing similar practices in Asian and African cities (Roy, 2013).

This working group is part of a transdisciplinary conversation among Latin American academics that includes work on the circulation of heterogeneous urban policies: some associated with neoliberal urbanism (Duque Franco, 2013; Novais, 2010; Jajamovich, 2018; Silvestre, 2016), others linked to alternative or counter-hegemonic perspectives. The working group understands that the construction of urban policies and spaces involves both territorial and relational processes. Thus, promoting more just policies and territories requires problematizing the dynamics of urban policy circulation and promoting circuits—and actors—that mobilize alternative urban policies. Finally, sharing more general questions promoted by CLACSO and its working groups, the group maintains the need to interrogate these processes from and within Latin America, within the framework of the subordinate role the region has occupied in the geopolitics—and coloniality—of knowledge and urban models (Vainer, 2014).

Academic interest in the transnational movement of urban ideas, models, techniques, plans, and policies has increased over the last decade and a half, reflecting the acceleration and intensification of these processes themselves (Harris and Moore, 2013). Several researchers point out the inadequacy of continuing to analyze policy production within strictly national frameworks or in terms of a mechanical translation from the global to the local, proposing instead that it be approached in both relational and territorial terms (Cochrane and Ward, 2012). Thus, the international movement of diverse policies has been analyzed from various disciplines, including geography, urban studies, sociology, political science, anthropology, the history of urban planning, and the history of architecture, among others. Furthermore, the number of different concepts that attempt to address these processes has multiplied. policy transfer (Dolowitz and Marsh, 2000), policy mobility (McCann and Ward, 2011), urban learning assembly (McFarlane, 2011), fast policy (Peck and Theodore, 2015), among others.  

Some of the actors involved in such processes have been questioned using concepts such as international masterplanners, global intelligence corps, traveling technocrats, transnational planning figures, transfer agents, cadres of experts, etc. (Rapoport, 2015; Healey, 2013; Ward, 2005, 2010; Larner and Laurie, 2010; Jacobs and Lees, 2013; McCann, 2013). Other perspectives have shifted the focus from actors and policies to the socio-material aspects that enable and condition their displacements, focusing on the materialities, technologies, and circuits involved in these processes (McFarlane, 2011).

Originating in the fields of geography and planning, the literature on policy mobility It seeks to account for the mobile, networked, and actor-centered nature of policy production. This literature engages critically with the idea of policy transfer -  linked to political science. Thus, its approach is not limited to the actions of political elites but broadens the scope of inquiry and incorporates non-state agents. On the other hand, while the approach to policy transfer tends to focus on policies—and actors—linked to national scales, policy mobilities They are interested in processes of interreference between cities—whether in national contexts or across international scales. Finally, and in response to the conceptualization of transfer such as the adoption of fully formed and defined political models, the approach to mobilities It is proposed as sensitive to the process of mutation and transformation that policies go through each time they are translated and re-inserted into different contexts.

A controversial topic in the literature on policy mobility It is the supposed novelty of the processes it analyzes. Thus, its presentist bias and neglect of traditions such as the history of urban planning, which explores and documents the transurban journeys of ideas and planning models over the last 150 years, have been criticized (Harris and Moore, 2013). Latin America itself and its urban history are a prime example of this, as noted in the work of researchers early associated with CLACSO, such as Jorge Enrique Hardoy (1988).

In turn, while the promoters of the mobility policy While recognizing and emphasizing the multidirectional flows of policies, models, and ideas, there is a predominance of analyses focused on North-North circuits. More recently, these issues have been expanded through dialogue with postcolonial perspectives that address the urban and the regional and have coined the category of global south or the Global South (Ong and Roy, 2011; Roy, 2013). Such approaches not only seek to geographically expand studies but also attempt to promote new geographies of urban theory production and to challenge dominant theories—rooted in European and North American urban experiences (Parnell and Robinson, 2012).

Likewise, some researchers indicated that the approach to policy mobility It is necessary to avoid a fetishism of mobility. Since the geographies of urban policy mobility are as unequal as any other geography, it is relevant to consider the power differences in access to the networks and political actors that drive, delimit, and enable certain policy flows—while simultaneously preventing others—reflecting long-standing legacies of power relations. That is, why are some policies prominent and mobile while others remain in the shadows and condemned to the strictest immobility (Temenos and Baker, 2015)? In other words, there are policies—and geographies—of the circulation of urban policies. This last point is particularly relevant to the proposed working group, given that it focuses on the circulation of urban policies and models in/of Latin America, while also analyzing the circulation of hegemonic urban policies, the circulation of resistance to them, and the mobility of alternative urban policies and models.