What's Wrong with Best Practice? Questioning the Typification of New Urbanism

Best practice is most often perceived as a powerful heuristic tool for the dissemination of innovation and knowledge. Hence, its formation and acceptance are seldom questioned. The unquestioned compliance with practices labelled as 'best', however, obscures the processes of typification that enable it—that is to say, the cultural struggles, tensions, conflicts, collaborations, alliances and personal/professional justifications that prefigure it. This paper uses the proliferation of New Urbanism in Toronto to unpack theoretically the typification of best practice in order to demonstrate how the universal abstraction of this principle-based movement is under-pinned by deeper, highly situated, constructions of aligned interests and emergent socio-political rationalities.