Project Aims

New Forms of Governance in Motion and Mutation: The Case of Business Improvement Districts is an on-going PhD project carried out by Diogo Gaspar Silva under the scientific supervision of Professor Herculano Cachinho (University of Lisbon) and Kevin Ward (The University of Manchester). This 4-year project is funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT, I.P.).

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Over the last decades, several urban shopping districts worldwide have been diagnosed with declining socio-economic vitality and viability. Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) - a geographic area in which property owners and/or businesspeople democratically decide to pay a compulsory levy that is ringfenced for financing supplementary placemaking activities - have been heralded in a wide range of international policymaking circuits as a 'panacea' to address urban and economic decline.

 

Like any other contemporary policy, BIDs do not move around as 'ready-to-apply models'. While BIDs are relationally produced through urban comparisons, BID's reterritorialization remains a territorial and fixed process depending on how policies are contextualized into new territorial contexts. Drawing on recent, and still emerging, debates underpinning policy mobilities-mutations and urban experimentation literatures, this project aims to contribute to these recent debates by theorizing 'the urban' and urban policymaking through comparative and experimentation practices in different, yet comparable, micro-local settings where BIDs are not currently in place. Therefore, this project aims to:

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• Discuss the theoretical, conceptual and analytical approaches to the international circulation of urban policies in a context of globalization and experimentation with neo-liberal policies.

• Explore the BID concept and its internationalization as a contemporary form of local governance to foster the resilience and revitalization of traditional shopping districts in the context of the emergence of entrepreneurial urban governance.

• Explore in-depth the difference that "local" context makes in the territorialization of BIDs.

• Conduct urban experiments to territorialize BIDs as a new form of governance in three urban shopping districts in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area.

• Propose policy recommendations toward the contextualization and implementation of contractual forms of local governance, such as BIDs, to induce urban revitalization.