Welcome: Francesca Blanc
Guests: Ryan Whitney (Universidad de los Andes, Seneca College) & David López García, The New School.
In the last decades, the circulation of urban policies has shifted its travelling direction from North-South to South-South and even South-North. A growing number of experiences have risen from Latin America with ‘leveraging cities’ such as Bogotá (Colombia) and its Bus Rapid Transport or ciclovía models that have been mobilized to other cities in both the global South and the global North. The same happened to Porto Alegre (Brazil) and its participatory budgeting model which has been travelling to a huge number of cities all-around the World. Despite the shift of Latin American countries ‘from import to export’, the politics that underpin policy circulation hide global power asymmetries faced by the current policy mobilities literature. Mexico City is an interesting case study of ‘global-local assembling process’ from where analyzing the collision between global urban politics and local governance. Our guests will contribute with an open dialogue for exploring the tensions between travelling institutional arrangements and local policy making in the Global South.
