Grounding mobile policies: Ad hoc networks and the creative city in Bandung,Indonesia

This paper explores the ad hoc networks that form to move policies to new sites by examining the process through which the city of Bandung, Indonesia adopted a creative city policy. As revealed through the Bandung case, attention to the formation of these networks highlights the way that power operates within them, privileging certain ideas and structuring the ways in which information flows through their channels. This insight suggests that the concept of policy mobilities would be enriched by a closer attention to the way power is used to construct networks that promote specific policies and places as sites of ‘best practice’. Furthermore, this paper extends the concept of policy mobilities to a city ‘off the map’. In contrast to most existing policy mobilities research that tends to focus on the stable, large‐scale networks through which policies travel and on the high‐profile cities constructed as policy models, the case of Bandung provides a study of how policy mobilities may occur differently outside of its well‐established locations.