Mobile policies Downtown revitalization

e co eor l an elop fixit em New Urbanist planning models in shaping downtowns will be examined in terms of: (1) how and by in con be un he late vert th ready-made, off-the-shelf policies and best practices that can be quickly applied locally. It is in this context of ‘fast policy transfer ’ (Peck and Theodore, 2001, p. 429) that figurative motion in the policy world becomes literal motion. Policy actors (a broadly defined category including politicians, policy professionals, practitioners, activists, and consul-tants) act as ‘transfer agents ’ (Stone, 2004), shuttling policies and (Calthorpe and Fulton, 2001), Porto Alegre for participatory bud-geting and direct democracy (Baiocchi, 2003). Thus, in a policy sense as in other ways, cities are constituted through their rela-tions with other places and scales (Massey, 1991, forthcoming). Yet, while motion and relationality define contemporary policy-making, this is only half the picture. Policies and policy-making are also intensely and fundamentally local, grounded, and territorial. Even a cursory familiarity with the examples above confirms this point, since our ability to refer to complex policies through the use of a shorthand of city names indicates how tied they are to spe-cific places. There is a ‘Barcelona model ’ of urban regeneration, for * Corresponding author