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On the surface, contemporary urban megaprojects suggest a convergence in form: office towers, hotels, museums, shopping and renewed public spaces often involving transnational firms and renowned architectsHowever, framing local policiesas instances of a 'serial reproduction' of iconic landscapes obscures more than reveals how circulating planning models are reproduced and institutionalized. To this effect, this paper suggests a complementary approach between the literature of policy mobilities and new institutionalism focusing on how policies are 'arrived at' and the role of ideas in the policy process. An analytical framework is applied to the case study of a large-scale waterfront regeneration programme in Rio de Janeiro to examine the mutual evolvement between ideas, interests and institutions. The paper concludes by stressing the importance ofpaying attention to how policy knowledge is assembled, institutionalized and interests identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on policy mobility has tended to focus on what moves (e.g. policy models, templates) and who moves them (e.g. consultants, international organisations), with less attention paid to the relational politics of grounding dominant ideas in local policymaking. The 'demand side' at the end of the mobilisation process (e.g. local authorities and policy actors) is usually depicted as passive or as having stable interests. This assumption is problematic as it can reinforce taken-for-granted power asymmetries in the flow of urban policy ideas, particularly in cases where cities in the Global North are presented as 'exporting sites' for a Global South audience of 'importing sites'. Drawing on the concept of policy ideas as 'coalition magnets' from policy studies, this article demonstrates how local policies are relationally produced by cosmopolitan policy actors on the 'demand side' who strategically mobilise circulating ideas as a tool for coalition building. We provide a relational comparative study of Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro's policy processes and urban outcomes in mobilising the Barcelona model of urban regeneration and strategic planning, drawing on evidence from interviews, document analysis and the biographies of key policy actors. We demonstrate the strategic importance of mobile policies for emerging political actors who employ them as a 'coalition magnet' to build support for their governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]