Acceso usuarios
Ian Cook, Stephen V. Ward, Kevin Ward
This article builds upon a relatively small but growing literature in geography, planningand cognate disciplines that seeks to understand the variegated geographies andhistories of policy mobilities. The article uses a case study of an exchange trip betweentown planners in the Soviet Union and the UK between 1957 and 1958. It focuses on theexperiences of the British planners in the Soviet Union and sets the tour within the widercontext of a fluctuating and sometimes turbulent history of Anglo-Soviet politics, travelsand connections. In doing this, the article makes three arguments: first, there is much tobe gained by bringing together the geography-dominated policy mobilities literaturewith that on exchanges and visits by architects, engineers and planners. Secondly, thegreater sensitivity to the histories of policy mobilities allows contemporary studies to becontextualized in the longer history of organized learning between different urbanprofessions. Thirdly, despite the long history of policy mobilities, what differentiates thecurrent era from previous eras is the prominent ‘knowledge intermediary’ roles nowplayed by consultancies and think tanks. As the article will demonstrate, it was branchesof government and professional bodies, rather than consultancies and think tanks, thattended to dominate such roles previously.
