Mobilizing Success and Failure
Strategic Ambivalence in Policy Mobility—Brasília and Argentina's Capital Relocation Debate
Datos Bibliográficos
| ID | 23309681 |
|---|---|
| Autores | Guillermo Jajamovich (0000-0001-9628-2468, autor de correspondencia) |
| Año | 2026 |
| Fecha de publicación | 2026-07-30 |
| Peer Reviewed | Sí |
| Open Access | Sí |
| Tipo | ARTICLE |
| Revista | International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (JOURNAL) |
| Identificadores de la revista | ISSN: 0309-1317 • E-ISSN: 1468-2427 |
| Editorial | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/1468-2427.70135 |
| OpenAlex | W7171931691 |
| Idioma | EN |
| Referencias citadas | 29 |
Drawing on debates in policy mobility and relational urbanism, this article examines the proposal to relocate Argentina's federal capital from Buenos Aires to Viedma–Carmen de Patagones in the mid‐1980s. It analyzes how external references were strategically mobilized across political and scalar arenas, focusing on the heterogeneous uses of Brasília during the debate. Rather than treating success and failure as opposing evaluations held by different actors, the article advances the concept of strategic ambivalence to capture the simultaneous mobilization of the same reference by the same politically powerful actors across different audiences, scales and moments of contestation. Brasília circulated at once as a successful model of territorial integration and as a cautionary example associated with urban, fiscal and planning failures—not as competing readings advanced by opponents, but as coexisting framings actively governed by proponents. This simultaneity, the article argues, is not inconsistency but a constitutive political practice. The article contributes to policy mobility scholarship by moving beyond accounts that locate divergent framings of success and failure in actors or coalitions and by showing how the politics of comparison itself—its connections, disconnections and deliberate instability—is strategically governed by state elites in contested territorial projects.
Ambivalence · Capital (architecture) · Political capital · Politics · Relocation · Scholarship · State (computer science) · Policy Transfer and Learning · Politics and Society in Latin America · Urban Planning and Governance
Understanding Policy Mobility
Urban geographies I
Cities in Relations
Worlding Cities
Learning from failed policy mobilities
The plan for a new Argentine capital
Urban policy mobility, anti-politics, and histories of the transnational municipal movement
Policy failure mobilities
Thinking cities through elsewhere
The urban politics of policy failure
In the tracks of Comparative Urbanism
Actually Existing Comparative Urbanism
The relational co-production of “success” and “failure,” or the politics of anxiety of exporting urban “models” elsewhere
The myth of the “Brasília of the North”
Beyond failure
Tracing as comparative method
Introduction
Temporary projects, durable outcomes
Mobilising a counterhegemonic idea
Geographies of policy knowledge
Towards a relational comparative approach to the study of cities
Mobile Adaptation and Sticky Experiments
Researching the Geographies of Policy Mobility
Urban Redevelopment Policies on the Move
Failure matters
From Budapest to Brussels
Thinking Through Dualisms in Urban Policy Mobilities
Planning Histories and Practices of Circulating Urban Knowledge
A Small Entrepreneurial City in Action
| Velocidad de citación | historical |
|---|---|
| Altamente citado | No |