Silvestre, GC-S; (2017) Circulating knowledge and urban change: ideas, interests and institutions in the development of Olympic Rio de Janeiro. Doctoral thesis , UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This research examines why and how local policy actors engage with globally circulating ideas about urban policies and what are the broader implications of this mobilisation process. Grand visions for the development of cities have long generated interest in urban scholarship and attention has often been paid to identify the practices, models and techniques that travelled across geographical boundaries. There is however, a renewed interest spanning disciplines to critically engage with the way context-specific policies and expertise are abstracted, circulated and adapted into new political settings. This is particularly important at times in which cities are brought together in a context of competition for resources, measured against each other and encouraged to learn from ‘best practices’. The contemporary development of the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil provides the basis of this study where it is claimed to be currently undergoing a watershed moment due the preparations for the 2016 Olympic Games. The focus is on three policies pursued since the mid-1990s that have had profound impacts on the city’s development trajectory: strategic planning, the attraction of mega-events, and waterfront regeneration. These circulating policies are examined through a socio-constructivist perspective that combines relational thinking to examine urban change and a framework of policy analisys that consider ideas, interests and institutions as mutually constitutive. In order to analyse the circulation of policy ideas and their situated mobilisation into public policies, this thesis draws on detailed archival research and semi-structured interviews with a range of policymakers, planners, consultants, developers, scholars and activists. It argues that an appreciation of how policies are not just defined ‘in place’, can help us to understand the ways in which development is relationally pursued, and how globally circulating ideas are grounded and institutionalised into local urban policies

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