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 a policy instrument, urban agendas can be operationalized through various tools and techniques: legislation acts; new or redesigned urban policy programmes and non-urban public policies; proceduralized tasks and ad-hoc institutions; newly established bodies of government and dedicated administrative units; frameworks for intergovernmental, public-private cooperation, for coordination; financial devices; expert task forces, and so on. The urban agenda may be comprised of many issues or be very selective with only a few issues. As regards the expected effects, it might contain redistributive issues according to a social urban agenda, and distributive issues as well, pursuing a centralized or decentralized state-sponsored urban development. The social face of urban agendas is more conditioned by ideological factors (Kantor 2013) and the influence of national coalitions of interests, conservative, socialist, or progressive ideas. Even in contexts where extreme liberalism is predominant, there are measures for the disadvantaged and for the reduction of social disparities within some hope of urban social welfare. 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”. Attribution of the chapters' sections: Francesca Gelli is the contributor for Sects. 1, 2, 3, and 4, and Matteo Basso for Sects. 5 and 6. The chapter presents the theoretical foundations and the interpretative framework of the volume: "Identifying Models of National Urban Agendas. A View to the Global Transition", which is the outcome of a comparative research involving 22 researchers and 12 international case studies. The comparative research was first developed within the Jean Monnet Chair “The Urban and Territorial dimension of EU policies” held by Francesca Gelli (from 2016 to 2019) at the University Iuav of Venice.