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Urban experts consider the future of night-time economies' governance during the pandemic and beyond in this scholarly and accessible guide. They use global case studies to illustrate a range of socio-economic issues in cities after dark, and investigate the role of public and private sectors and leaders in shaping urban planning and policy.

In this paper, we highlight the importance for policy mobility research to engage with the 'multiple temporalities' of globally prevalent urban policy ideas to understand how these eventually come to shape localities incrementally, and as we show, in sometimes unexpected manners. Through the study of over 10 years of (failed) redevelopment policies in Cape Town's East City, we formulate two distinct contributions to existing urban policy mobility research. Firstly, we show that looking at the micro-politics of policy mobility in particular places, and over time, can help elucidate how conflicts and resistance to globally mobile urban models shape which aspects of a policy solutions are rendered mobile or immobile, present or absent and, finally, what ends up being implemented in the local context through specific projects. Secondly, we expand on new materialist approaches to urban policy mobility, bringing insights from performativity theory, to look at how ideas and models come to be 'enacted' in the real world through various and, perhaps more importantly, uncoordinated means. Our case study shows that policy mobility research should attend to disparate, uncoordinated, more-than-human activities, and how these end up shaping places even in the absence of purposive planning. That way, we show how changing and complex configurations of more than human networks, objects, money, buildings, etc. support the concrete performance of abstract and mobile urban models – in place and over time.

AbstractThe growing interest in urban areas as sites for climate action has led to new ways of conceiving and planning the urban. As climate actions reshape existing understandings of what cities are or ought to be, they constitute new modalities of what recent scholarship has referred to as 'climate urbanism'. This research has framed climate urbanism as a climate‐inflected iteration of neoliberal urban development, geared towards the mobilization of 'green' private capital for large‐scale infrastructural projects, focused on carbon metrics, and conducive to population displacement through eco‐gentrification. In this intervention, we commend these efforts to deliver a critical perspective on how climate change gives rise to forms of urbanism that reproduce urban injustices without addressing the root causes of the climate crisis. However, we warn against two biases in recent scholarship, namely an emphasis on technological solutions and an overreliance on familiar contexts of climate action. The literature on climate urbanism does not yet reflect the diversity of urban responses emerging under the broad umbrella of urban climate action. Adopting a post‐colonial perspective on climate urbanism, we call for a greater engagement with the heterogeneous character of climate‐changed urban futures.