Knowledge and Craft of Urban Agendas

Currently, international policy studies on urban agendas have gained great momentum. Indeed, important cross-disciplinary insights are being proposed in case study analysis of agenda-setting processes in comparative policy research. Urban agendas are conceived as communicative acts and analyzed in literature as policy discourses, to the extent they constitute an influential representation of urban reality, framing problems and setting a hierarchy of relevant issues. Our research has more to do with urban agendas as attempts to address the challenges that urbanization poses for governments, as a field of public policy: an urban agenda is a type of policy instrument to frame urban problems, and organize related urban policymaking. As such, they are not neutral tools of public policy, as far as the system of values on which they are constructed and which they aim to pursue is concerned. We argue, therefore, that urban agendas not only transform their configurations, scopes, and ranges of application over time; they also reveal a (changing) policy narrative, a way of conceiving cities and urban that has significant consequences in terms of how implementation tools are “framed”.