The geographical literature on urban policymaking has made a considerable contribution to enabling understandings of the relational processes involved in assembling local policies. Reviewing this literature’s journey from its origins in political science to its recent embrace of poststructuralism, this article argues that the debates and discussions involved have arrived at a point of core epistemological tension. Taking its own conceptual inspiration from thinking interurban space topologically, the article thus raises a number of questions regarding the assumptions associated with terms such as mobility and circulation, persistent in the languages of policy research and practice. Exploring these questions through a post-colonial ethnography of sustainable city visions in Lusaka, Zambia, and Sacramento, California, the article subsequently makes a series of contributions regarding the way policymaking regimes remain powerfully situated in space and time. To properly account for the workings of power and its ability to colonize policy practices, the article challenges us to therefore reflect on the value of transitioning away from thinking about policy ideas as capable of being mobile, circulated from place to place, and to instead unpack how particular territorial representations of place are (re)produced (including by geographers) within the confines of hegemonic ideas about city futures.

关于城市政策制定的地理文献对理解地方政策的相关过程做出了相当大的贡献。本文回顾了该文献从起源于政治科学到最近接受后结构主义的历程，本文认为，所涉及的辩论和讨论已经达到了核心认识论紧张的程度。本文从对城市间空间的拓扑学思考中汲取了自己的概念灵感，因此就与流动性和流通性等术语相关的假设提出了一些问题。，坚持政策研究和实践的语言。通过对赞比亚卢萨卡和加利福尼亚州萨克拉门托的可持续城市愿景的后殖民民族志探索这些问题，本文随后就政策制定制度在空间和时间中保持强大地位的方式做出了一系列贡献。为了正确解释权力的运作及其对政策实践的殖民化能力，这篇文章要求我们反思从将政策理念转变为能够移动、在各地传播的想法转变为解开包装的价值。在关于城市未来的霸权观念的范围内，如何（重新）生产（包括地理学家）特定的地方地域表征。