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Policy mobilities scholarship has comprehensively challenged the methodological nationalism and rational orthodoxies of policy studies. Contributing to recent debates on policy mobilities and post-politics, this paper examines how struggles over the 'national' shape policy on the move. Focussing on attempts to embed accountable care models across the English National Health Service (NHS), I consider how 'integration' has been mobilised as a seemingly irresistible solution to the failures of market-orientated healthcare reforms in times of austerity. Yet, I foreground how campaigners slowed down the local contracting of accountable care through repoliticising circulating policy as the 'Americanization' of the NHS. The paper emphasises the ongoing, yet shifting and politically contested, role of the state and national spatial imaginaries in the making and translating of globally mobile policy. Rethinking the times and spaces of politics and policy in the current conjuncture, I conclude by warning of the limits of nostalgia for the post-war national welfare state when pushing for universal healthcare as a right for all.

This paper provides new direction for geographic scholarship on architecture by focusing upon architectural projects that go well beyond designing and producing material objects. Recent work on practising architectures by social and cultural geographers has examined the multiple processes of human and non-human actors that cohere and congeal to produce buildings. Responding to concerns that geographers are failing to work closely with architects, I introduce ideas of spatial agency to examine the practices of architects working beyond buildings. Arguing that the profession has always been under threat, I outline why socially progressive architects are rejecting claims as expert technical problem-solvers or artistic form-givers by instead initiating and contributing towards explicitly spatial projects prioritizing social and economic objectives. By calling for creative engagement with such projects, I set forth an agenda for a politically progressive geography of architecture.

This paper provides new direction for geographic scholarship on architecture by focusing upon architectural projects that go well beyond designing and producing material objects. Recent work on practising architectures by social and cultural geographers has examined the multiple processes of human and non-human actors that cohere and congeal to produce buildings. Responding to concerns that geographers are failing to work closely with architects, I introduce ideas of spatial agency to examine the practices of architects working beyond buildings. Arguing that the profession has always been under threat, I outline why socially progressive architects are rejecting claims as expert technical problem-solvers or artistic form-givers by instead initiating and contributing towards explicitly spatial projects prioritizing social and economic objectives. By calling for creative engagement with such projects, I set forth an agenda for a politically progressive geography of architecture.

There are limits in articulating political struggles around the NHS and the imagined geographies of the nation: struggles based on nostalgia for the post-war welfare state risk co-opting the NHS for an exclusionary, nationalist politics. In tracing the times and spaces of the health
service the article asks: when was the NHS? and where is the NHS? The idea of universal healthcare - and changing ideas of nation, state and welfare - are articulated in particular political conjunctures. The whereabouts of the NHS is more than a question of devolution and territorial politics
in an increasingly disunited Kingdom; there are also questions of borders, and of workers who are trained and drawn into the NHS from overseas: it is impossible to imagine the NHS without grappling with the ways in which colonialism is integral to the formation of the post-war national welfare
state. As both a residual of the national welfare state, and as an emergent site of political and cultural work, the NHS is continuously reworked within dominant politics; while it also offers an emotionally powerful political resource to galvanise popular public support that
resists such tendencies. We therefore insist on the need to get to grips with the complex and partial embedding of private interests and market logics within the organisation of healthcare - often framed, rather crudely, in terms of the 'Americanisation' of the NHS. But we also warn of the
analytical limits, and political dangers, of framing political struggles around national spatial imaginaries when seeking to 'protect' the NHS in these times of crisis.

Health and care policy is increasingly promoted within visions of the competitive city‐region. This paper examines the importance of policy boosterism within the political construction of city‐regions in the context of English devolution. Based on a two‐year case study of health and social care devolution in Greater Manchester, England, we trace the relational and territorial geographies of policy across and through new "devolved" city‐regional arrangements. Contributing to geographical debates on policy assemblages and city‐regionalism, we advance a conceptual framework linking crisis and opportunity, emulation and exceptionalism, and evidence and experimentation. The paper makes two key contributions. First, we argue health and care policy is increasingly drawn towards the logic of global competitiveness without being wholly defined by neoliberal political agendas. Fostering transnational policy networks helped embed global "best practice" policies while simultaneously hailing Greater Manchester as a place beyond compare. Second, we caution against positioning the city‐region solely at the receiving end of devolutionary austerity. Rather, we illustrate how the urgency of devolution was conditioned by crisis, yet concomitantly framed as a unique opportunity by the local state harnessing policy to negotiate a more fluid politics of scale. In doing so, the paper demonstrates how attempts to resolve the "local problem" of governing health and care under austerity were rearticulated as a "global opportunity" to forge new connections between place, health, and economy. Consequently, we foreground the multiple tensions and contradictions accumulating through turning to health and care to push Greater Manchester further, faster. The paper concludes by asking what the present crisis might mean for city‐regions in good health and turbulent times.

In this paper, we examine how space is integral to the practices and politics of restructuring health and care systems and services and specifically how ideas of assemblage can help understand the remaking of a region. We illustrate our arguments by focusing on health and social care devolution in Greater Manchester, England. Emphasising the open-ended political construction of the region, we consider the work of assembling different actors, organisations, policies and resources into a new territorial formation that provisionally holds together without becoming a fixed totality. We highlight how the governing of health and care is shaped through the interplay of local, regional and national actors and organisations coexisting, jostling and forging uneasy alliances. Our goal is to show that national agendas continued to be firmly embedded within the regional project, not least the politics of austerity. Yet through keeping the region together as if it was an integrated whole and by drawing upon new global policy networks, regional actors strategically reworked national agendas in attempts to leverage and compete for new resources and powers. We set out a research agenda that foregrounds how the political reorganisation of health and care is negotiated and contested across multiple spatial dimensions simultaneously.

In this paper, we examine how space is integral to the practices and politics of restructuring health and care systems and services and specifically how ideas of assemblage can help understand the remaking of a region. We illustrate our arguments by focusing on health and social care devolution in Greater Manchester, England. Emphasising the open‐ended political construction of the region, we consider the work of assembling different actors, organisations, policies and resources into a new territorial formation that provisionally holds together without becoming a fixed totality. We highlight how the governing of health and care is shaped through the interplay of local, regional and national actors and organisations coexisting, jostling and forging uneasy alliances. Our goal is to show that national agendas continued to be firmly embedded within the regional project, not least the politics of austerity. Yet through keeping the region together as if it was an integrated whole and by drawing upon new global policy networks, regional actors strategically reworked national agendas in attempts to leverage and compete for new resources and powers. We set out a research agenda that foregrounds how the political reorganisation of health and care is negotiated and contested across multiple spatial dimensions simultaneously.

This paper explores how 'place' is conceptualised and mobilized in health policy and considers the implications of this. Using the on-going spatial reorganizing of the English NHS as an exemplar, we draw upon relational geographies of place for illumination. We focus on the introduction of 'Sustainability and Transformation Plans' (STPs): positioned to support improvements in care and relieve financial pressures within the health and social care system. STP implementation requires collaboration between organizations within 44 bounded territories that must reach 'local' consensus about service redesign under conditions of unprecedented financial constraint. Emphasising the continued influence of previous reorganizations, we argue that such spatialized practices elude neat containment within coherent territorial geographies. Rather than a technical process financially and spatially 'fixing' health and care systems, STPs exemplify post-politics-closing down the political dimensions of policy-making by associating 'place' with 'local' empowerment to undertake highly resource-constrained management of health systems, distancing responsibility from national political processes. Relational understandings of place thus provide value in understanding health policies and systems, and help to identify where and how STPs might experience difficulties.