Entrepreneurial urbanism and the management of the Contemporary City: the Examples of Business Improvement Districts

This paper seeks to examine processes of state restructuring in exploring the ways inwhich Business Improvement Districts are being introduced into UK cities. Inadvancing the analysis the focus here is on the way in which one or two New YorkBusiness Improvement Districts were constructed as ‘models’ of urban managementthat could be taken out of their particular local and State contexts and introducedinto a diverse set of local political economic contexts in UK cities and towns.Examining the way Business Improvement Districts have become a policy in motion,the paper sketches out the emergence of entrepreneurial urban governancearrangements in the UK as part of the state’s changing spatiality in the industrializedeconomies of Western Europe and North America. Seeking to move beyond therather one-sided and shallow representations of policies that find themselves on themove, the paper draws on work in New York to unpack the nature of the politicaleconomicrelations that Business Improvement Districts were part of, before movingon to examine the process of policy-transfer and the early days of the introduction ofthe ‘model’ into UK cities.