Travelling Ideas, Power and Place: The Cases of Urban Villages and Business Improvement Districts

A multitude of concepts and ideas have shaped practices in professions such as planning, urban design and urban management.  Now, however, the speed and intensity by which these ideas travel seems historically unprecedented. This paper explores how some of these ideas are formed and circulated, often with unpredictable consequences.  In order to understand the circulation and impact of these ideas this paper constructs an analytical framework which views these concepts within wider networks of social agents and institutions. Using insights from actor-network theory and discourse analysis we propose a framework that focuses our understanding of how ideas are translated into new spatial settings.  The examples of the Urban Village and the Business Improvement District will be used to explicate the analytical framework.  In concluding, the paper assesses the utility of the analytic framework in explaining the travel of planning ideas.