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Título do plano de trabalhos em inglês: New Forms of Urban Governance in Motion and Mutation: The Case of Business Improvement District. Movimento e mutação nas novas formas de governança urbana: o caso dos Business Improvement Districts
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Researching policy presence and absence: implications and practicalities for urban policy mobilities
Publication . Silva, Diogo Gaspar
Researching comparatively urban policymaking processes has become an ordinary praxis within urban policy mobilities studies. While it has been broadly accepted that thinking through relational dualisms, such as that of policy presence/absence, is useful to examine urban policymaking processes across multiple spatialities and
temporalities, less attention has been paid to how we comparatively study such arenas. This article stands as an invitation to reflect on the methodological issues and implications of studying through sites and situations of policy presence and absence within urban policy mobilities. Building on a reflexive learning ontology that emerged out of an academic project that examines the relational and territorial (un)making of Business Improvement Districts across four English town centers, the article discusses how access to, navigation through and thickness of the evidence obtained from the research field is sensitive to the sites and situations of policy presence and absence where the research takes place. It is argued that studying such dissimilar policy arenas should encapsulate flexible research strategies to better attune to the situated processes and politics that engendered such policy outcomes. To address this concern, the article reflects on how positionality, institutional memory and chronopolitics should inform methodological praxis when researching sites and situations of policy presence and absence.
“We are the forerunners in Southern Europe”: experimenting with Business Improvement Districts in Greater Barcelona
Publication . Silva, Diogo Gaspar; Frago, Luís; Ward, Kevin
This paper uses the experimentation with Business Improvement Districts in Greater Barcelona to examine its relational re-making in a rather over-looked Southern-Mediterranean urban, socio-spatial and political-institutional context. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and institutional archives, it offers three intellectual contributions to urban policy mobilities studies. First, the paper argues that the territorial adaptation, mediation and translation of urban entrepreneurial policies hinges upon the differential and inherited nature of welfare regimes, state-market constellations and existing political infrastructures. Second, the paper outlines that policymakers have followed open-ended and multilateral learning approaches through space and time, in which some policy features were (re-)learned, circulated and modified to fit more centralized regimes. Third, and finally, it sketches out the role of government-funded pilot programs as instances through which policies are showcased, experimented and ultimately constituted before and after their institutionalization in specific socio-legal and socio-spatial contexts.
Places of phygital shopping experiences? The new supply frontier of Business Improvement Districts in the Digital Age
Publication . Silva, Diogo Gaspar; Cachinho, Herculano
Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) have flourished as local governance structures to
foster the vitality and viability of traditional shopping districts that have struggled to adapt to retail
changes. This paper examines the evolution of placemaking activities that former UK governmentfunded pilot BIDs have delivered over the last 15 years. Drawing on an exploratory sequential research design that combines a qualitative and quantitative thematic analysis of 72 BIDs’ business
plans, the findings suggest that UK BIDs have described a non-hierarchical operational framework
as services providers considering that: (i) elementary placemaking services, such as ‘clean, green
and safe’, have regained thematic relevance due to recent environmental sustainability concerns; (ii)
higher-tier lobbying and advocacy services have been an operational priority since BIDs’ inception;
(iii) while consumer and place marketing/branding services have seen continual thematic reductions, digital presence and marketing services have emerged as a new category of operational activities. These results extend place management and BID-related literature by discussing the growing
role that digital marketing services may perform in the management of town centers and high
streets and are relevant to practitioners as it discusses how place management organizations should
reposition their operational strategies towards the creation of places of phygital shopping experiences.
Science mapping the academic knowledge on business improvement districts
Publication . Silva, Diogo Gaspar; Cachinho, Herculano; Ward, Kevin
Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) are a contemporary urban revitalization policy that
has been set in motion through international policymaking circuits. They have been presented as a
panacea to the economic and social challenges facing many cities and traditional shopping districts.
However, a comprehensive overview of the academic literature on this form of local governance
remains to be conducted. Drawing on bibliometric methods and bibliometrix R-tool, this paper
maps and examines the state-of-the-art of academic knowledge on BIDs published between 1979
and 2021. Findings suggest that (i) scientific production has increased since the early 2000s, has
crossed US borders but remains highly Anglo-Saxon-centered; (ii) academic knowledge on BIDs is
multidisciplinary and has been published in high-impact journals; (iii) influential documents on
BIDs have centered on three issues: urban governance/politics, policy mobilities–mutation and
impacts assessment and criticisms; (iv) while author collaboration networks exist, the interaction
between them is limited; (v) the conceptualization of BIDs has changed over time, both in thematic
and geographical focus. These results constitute the first science mapping on the academic literature
on BIDs, and we argue they should inform future scientific debates about the studying of this form of
local governance.
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Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia
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Número da atribuição
2020.06080.BD