Fifty years of Business Improvement Districts: A reappraisal of the dominant perspectives and debates

Originally created in 1970 by a small group of business people in Toronto’s Bloor West Village, Business Improvement Districts (hereafter BIDs) have become commonplace urban revitalisation strategies in cities across the world. Many critical urban scholars have conceptualised BIDs as neoliberal organisations and have resultantly critiqued their role in contemporary urban governance. With BIDs now existing for over 50 years, the purpose of this paper is to provide an overdue reappraisal of the BID research and orient future scholarship. After describing key debates from early BID research, this paper analyses two distinct themes in more recent scholarship: (1) BID policy mobility, and (2) BIDs and social regulation. As the BID model has been transferred to new locations across both the Global North and South, its rapid mobility demonstrates the permeability, resilience and limits of neoliberal urban policies. Moreover, BIDs’ social control tactics highlight how these organisations are shaped by a neoliberal logic that seeks to manage and control urban spaces in ways that attract desirable consumers and exclude the visible poor. This paper outlines the origins of both bodies of work and traces common patterns and variances over time. It concludes by highlighting gaps in the existing literature and offers suggestions for future work.