Leaving the City, Embracing the Nation‐State

Originally designed and introduced in the West Bloor Village shopping district in Toronto during the 1970s, Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) – a geographically bounded area in which property owners and/or business occupiers vote to pay an assessment or levy that is ring-fenced to fund a range of revitalization strategies within the district – have since appeared in cities across the Global North. They are now present in a wide range of politico-institutional and socio-spatial contexts beyond North America, ranging from the United Kingdom to South Africa and from Germany and Sweden to Spain. Through their broad remits focused on addressing the effects of ever-changing urban political economies aimed at inducing a ‘good business climate’ and improving the ‘quality of place’, BIDs have reinvented the ways in which High Streets and Main Streets are governed, experienced, and consumed. While BIDs seem to have become intertwined with, and influential governors of, urban futures, their actual involvement in the nature and scale of how High Street and Main Streets are governed remains shaped by a range of institutional aspects. This chapter will critically examine the development, rolling out, and transatlantic journeys of the BID ‘model’ between places with distinct political infrastructures, ideological stocks, and welfare regimes. In doing so, it argues that the territorial making of the BID ‘model’ and its overall resonance on how High Streets and Main Streets are governed, experienced, and consumed is shaped through the interplay with politico-institutional settings and welfare regime path dependencies.