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adoption in other places. Little is known, however, about the situated
practices and spaces through which policy actors learn and are even-
tually persuaded to adopt globally circulating policy models. In this
article, I highlighted two key elements in the process of policy learn-
ing between Bogotá and Guadalajara. First, the role of a particular
type of expert that I called “persuasive practitioners”. I showed that
the spread of Bogotá’s policies in Guadalajara can be traced back to
the visit of Enrique Peñalosa in 2003. Peñalosa is an example of a
“persuasive practitioner” because his legitimacy and capacity to in-
spire policy actors in other cities relies not on their technical or sci-
entific expertise but rather on a narrative that puts him at the center
of Bogotá’s urban transformation success. This is a story that glori-
fies small public space and transportation interventions as the cause
of Bogotá’s “urban renaissance”, what Peñalosa called “an infinity
of small things” in his Guadalajara talk. In this universe of “small
things”, the decentralization and democratization processes that
took place in Bogotá and Colombia in the late 1980s and early 1990s
or the increased tax collection achieved by previous Bogotá mayors
such as Jaime Castro or Antanas Mockus in the early and mid 1990s
are not included. Similarly, the contradictions and exclusions created
by Bogotá’s new public spaces are also silenced to create a simple and
straightforward narrative that gives agency to the policies themselves.
It is this powerful yet simplistic story of urban transformation linked
to public space and transportation policies what has spread world-
wide as the “Bogotá model”. The second element that I highlighted in
this article is the role that conferences and policy forums play in this
intercity policy learning process. The policies that this story glorifies
could have never spread globally without the face-to-face commu-
nication opportunities to tell this story that conference and policy
forums offer. Moving influential urban actors from policy knowledge
to action requires not only exchanges of knowledge and stories but
active processes of inspiration, persuasion and trust building that,
despite the increasing availability of online policy repositories, are
still best mobilized through face-to-face contact.
This article brought together discussions about policy diffusion,
transfer and mobilities with the narrative sensibilities of debates on
urban planning and storytelling and emotions as a productive effort
to disentangle the actual practices that explain how and why certain
policy models are adopted in other places. In telling the story of the
adoption of Bogotá’s policies in Guadalajara, this article has also a
moral: learning, and therefore policy learning, is never a rational pro-
cess but rather one influenced by emotions and aspirations of trans-
formation and progress. In order for a particular policy to circulate
and be adopted technical experts or objective data about the merits

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