| This is a transnational, socio-legal, comparative embedded case study of four business improvement districts (BIDs), two in Cape Town, WC, RSA and two in Newark, NJ, USA in the context of globalization, metropolitan regionalization, and urbanization. Contemporarily, urbanization is a global phenomenon. Already with more than half the world's population living in urban settings, two thirds are expected to be urbanized by 2030. The city is a long-time contested terrain. Who and what form of governance and management technologies will facilitate our urban future? Recently, global diffusion of local revitalization policy has led to the proliferation of BIDs across multiple continents. BIDs are generally self-financed organizations providing district-specific supplemental services with the power of government behind them. Using OECD's urban entrepreneurial governance analytical framework, this study comparatively investigates BIDs in different continents. The study internationalizes the dependent variable of the network model to explore sub-local BID interaction with independent variables of an entrepreneurial municipal government, BID transnational discourse, and national legal systems.;Embedded in the case study design are the BID, stakeholder segments, and individuals as units of analysis. Data collection was by semi-structured interviews, focus groups, documentary evidence, archival records, observation, and physical artifacts. Data analysis encompassed template and data matrix analysis, explanation-building, and legal research and analysis.;Findings indicate that BIDs are products of neoliberal localization mechanisms; and that the BID movement is starting to emerge as a transnational discourse community, suggesting global governance implications. Global and local forces driving BIDs appear to be mutually constitutive, not oppositional. In the transformation and reconfiguration of geographical and governance scales where regionalism and urbanism figure prominently into the global political economy, the nation-state remains the legal architect and arbiter enabling the worldwide advancement BIDs. However, public and private legal implications of BIDs extend beyond enabling legislation. |
