Homegrown / Imported policies

This chapter examines the movement of planning and architectural ideas between places, and it considers how best to understand this long-standing practice. The chapter starts by critically analysing a binary that could help our understanding—the home-grown ideas/imported ideas binary—and it reasons that the binary’s weaknesses outweigh its strengths. Instead, the chapter demonstrates that the sizeable literature on policy mobilities offers far more useful tools for making sense of the circulation of planning and architectural ideas. A case study of the planning of the Stockholm suburb of Vällingby (and the international attention it received during the 1950s and 1960s) is used to demonstrate the superiority of the policy mobilities perspective. However, it is argued that further refinement of the policy mobilities perspective is needed, and this is demonstrated, for instance, by the lack of attention to gender within studies of policy mobilities.