Urban studies, Political economy

Pursuing a doctor of philosophy degree

Supervisor: Jamie Peck

Entry Date:  September 2016

My dissertation research is a global ethnography of the urban “solutions” industry. Whether or not solutions to varied, cross-scalar urban crises genuinely exist remains an open question. But there is an entire industry that has sprung up based on the assumption that such solutions can be easily found, scaled, and marketized across cities. I am principally interested in the actors and organizations that think they are capable of supplying solutions en masse to diverse cities across the globe, frequently framed as urban initiatives that simultaneously address global catastrophic events, and how these typically extraurban agents are changing contemporary urban governance.

I am currently writing my dissertation: the data stems from two years of ethnographic fieldwork from 2018-2020, during which I worked full-time at parastatal think tanks in urban policymaking and attended various conferences.

Peck, J., Bok, R., Zhang, J. (2020) Hong Kong — a model on the rocks? Territory, Politics, Governance, 1-20. Online first. DOI: 10.1080/21622671.2020.1837221.

Bok, R. (2020) The relational co-production of “success” and “failure,” or the politics of anxiety of exporting urban “models” elsewhere. Urban Geography, 41(9), 1218-1239. (Honorable Mention, Urban Geography Early Career Researcher Prize)

Bok, R. (2020) “By our metaphors you shall know us”: The “fix” of geographical political economy. Progress in Human Geography, 43(6), 1087-1108.

Bok, R., and Coe, N. M. (2017) Geographies of policy knowledge: The state and corporate dimensions of contemporary policy mobilities. Cities, 63, 51-57.