IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/ijurrs/v45y2021i2p381-384.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Wayfinding in the Long Shadow of City Benchmarking: Or How to Manufacture (an Economy of) Comparability in the Global Urban

Author

Listed:
  • Rachel Bok

Abstract

In response to Acuto et al.’s invitation to ‘take city rankings seriously’, I suggest that one strategy for doing so would be to examine what the production and reproduction of these rankings reveals about the ways in which their makers seek to govern cities across the globe. Drawing upon twenty months of ethnographic research of the global urban ‘solutions’ industry, I offer an immersive critique of what happens when city rankings ‘go wild’, frequently beyond the intentions of their makers. Often with little choice but to play by the rules of the game of global urban entrepreneurialism, the injunction for urban policy actors to subscribe to dominant logics of city rankings gives rise to—and reinforces—three tendencies of contemporary global urbanism: wayfinding, performativity, and (auto)parody. I conclude by asking what is at stake for critical urban studies and critical urban scholars when we are encouraged to engage proactively and productively with city rankings.

Suggested Citation

  • Rachel Bok, 2021. "Wayfinding in the Long Shadow of City Benchmarking: Or How to Manufacture (an Economy of) Comparability in the Global Urban," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 45(2), pages 381-384, March.
  • Handle: RePEc:bla:ijurrs:v:45:y:2021:i:2:p:381-384
    DOI: 10.1111/1468-2427.12977
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12977
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/1468-2427.12977?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Brett Christophers, 2014. "Wild Dragons in the City: Urban Political Economy, Affordable Housing Development and the Performative World-making of Economic Models," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 38(1), pages 79-97, January.
    2. Joshua K. Leon, 2017. "Global cities at any cost," City, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 21(1), pages 6-24, January.
    3. Neil Brenner, 2009. "What is critical urban theory?," City, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 13(2-3), pages 198-207, June.
    4. Jenny McArthur & Enora Robin, 2019. "Victims of their own (definition of) success: Urban discourse and expert knowledge production in the Liveable City," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 56(9), pages 1711-1728, July.
    5. Michele Acuto & Daniel Pejic & Jessie Briggs, 2021. "Taking City Rankings Seriously: Engaging with Benchmarking Practices in Global Urbanism," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 45(2), pages 363-377, March.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Michele Acuto & Daniel Pejic & Jessie Briggs, 2021. "Whose City Benchmarks? The Role of the Critical Urbanist in Comparative Urban Measuring," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 45(2), pages 389-392, March.
    2. Jorn Koelemaij & Sam Taveirne & Ben Derudder, 2023. "An economic geography perspective on city diplomacy," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 60(6), pages 995-1012, May.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Enora Robin, 2021. "City Benchmarking, Globalized Urban Scholarship and the View from Above: Reflections on a Few Absences," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 45(2), pages 378-380, March.
    2. Eduardo Mendieta, 2010. "The city to come: Critical urban theory as utopian mapping," City, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 14(4), pages 442-447, August.
    3. Bartzokas-Tsiompras, Alexandros & Bakogiannis, Efthimios & Nikitas, Alexandros, 2023. "Global microscale walkability ratings and rankings: A novel composite indicator for 59 European city centres," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 111(C).
    4. Iain White, 2020. "Rigour and rigour mortis? Planning, calculative rationality, and forces of stability and change," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 57(14), pages 2885-2900, November.
    5. Peter Marcuse, 2010. "In defense of theory in practice," City, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 14(1-2), pages 4-12, February.
    6. Hanna Hilbrandt & Monika Grubbauer, 2020. "Standards and SSOs in the contested widening and deepening of financial markets: The arrival of Green Municipal Bonds in Mexico City," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 52(7), pages 1415-1433, October.
    7. Jennifer Robinson & Katia Attuyer, 2021. "Extracting Value, London Style: Revisiting the Role of the State in Urban Development," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 45(2), pages 303-331, March.
    8. Carijn Beumer, 2017. "Sustopia or Cosmopolis? A Critical Reflection on the Sustainable City," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 9(5), pages 1-14, May.
    9. Cardullo, Paolo, 2017. "Gentrification in the mesh? Ethnography of Open Wireless Network - Deptford," OSF Preprints jm68s, Center for Open Science.
    10. Chiara Certomà, 2020. "Digital Social Innovation and Urban Space: A Critical Geography Agenda," Urban Planning, Cogitatio Press, vol. 5(4), pages 8-19.
    11. Oren Yiftachel, 2016. "The Aleph—Jerusalem as critical learning," City, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 20(3), pages 483-494, June.
    12. Theresa Enright, 2023. "Art in transit: Mobility, aesthetics and urban development," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 60(1), pages 67-84, January.
    13. Lindsay Blair Howe, 2021. "Thinking through people: The potential of volunteered geographic information for mobility and urban studies," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 58(14), pages 3009-3028, November.
    14. Vahid Javidroozi & Claudia Carter & Michael Grace & Hanifa Shah, 2023. "Smart, Sustainable, Green Cities: A State-of-the-Art Review," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 15(6), pages 1-28, March.
    15. Veikko Eranti & Taina Meriluoto, 2023. "PLURALITY IN URBAN POLITICS: Conflict and Commonality in Mouffe and Thévenot," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 47(5), pages 693-709, September.
    16. Ismael Blanco & Steven Griggs & Helen Sullivan, 2014. "Situating the local in the neoliberalisation and transformation of urban governance," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 51(15), pages 3129-3146, November.
    17. Suzanne Vallance & Harvey C. Perkins & Jacky Bowring & Jennifer E. Dixon, 2012. "Almost Invisible: Glimpsing the City and its Residents in the Urban Sustainability Discourse," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 49(8), pages 1695-1710, June.
    18. James Rodriguez, 2024. "Carceral connections: The role of policing in the management of public housing in New York City," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 61(3), pages 513-530, February.
    19. Rachel Weber, 2021. "Embedding futurity in urban governance: Redevelopment schemes and the time value of money," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 53(3), pages 503-524, May.
    20. Wojciech Keblowski & Frédéric Dobruszkes & Kobe Boussauw, 2022. "Moving past sustainable transport studies: Towards a critical perspective on urban transport," ULB Institutional Repository 2013/341191, ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:ijurrs:v:45:y:2021:i:2:p:381-384. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0309-1317 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.