From policy mobility to top-down policy transfer: ‘Comfortization’ of Russian cities beyond neoliberal rationality

Abstract

As cities around the world increasingly seek to brand themselves as comfortable and liveable places, policies aimed at enhancing the quality of the urban environment are becoming more important. Scholars interpret this development as evidence of reinforced urban entrepreneurialism and neoliberalization. The current paper focuses on comfortable city policies in Russia, where political, social and economic transformations were often depicted as the ‘Eastern branch’ of the global neoliberalization project. It draws on field data from a case study of two cities in the Russian Arctic. By focusing on locations far away from global nodes, where the ideas of a comfortable city originally took shape, we trace and analyse policy mutations and local adjustments of such policies, as well as the related rationalities and policymaking dynamics. Our findings speak to the literature on policy mobility by questioning the focus on cities as entrepreneurial actors and the depiction of comfortable city policies as mere vehicles of neoliberalism. In Russia, what began with the introduction of entrepreneurial, globally circulating comfortable city policies incrementally turned into a top-down political project that cannot be easily explained – neither by neoliberal rationality nor by the legacies of urban planning and development.