CityReads | How to Conduct Comparative Urban Studies?

Robinson J 城读 2022-07-13

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How to Conduct Comparative Urban Studies?

Comparative Urbanism argues for a comparative imagination which is open and agile, drawing comparative practice back to its core features: thinking with elsewhere, to interrogate and change concepts.

Jennifer Robinson. 2022. Comparative Urbanism: Tactics for Global Urban Studies, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Picture source:

Dilomprizulike: Waiting for Bus, 2003 and Antonio Ole: Township Wall, 2004. Hayward Gallery (2005) Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent.

http://www.universes-in-universe.de/specials/africa-remix/dilomprizulike/english.htm

This article is an edited excerpt from the Introduction to the forthcoming book, Comparative Urbanism: Tactics for Global Urban Studies by Jennifer Robinson, Professor of Urban Geography at University College London. I would like to thank Dr. Xiaoyang Wang for translating the original text into Chinese. I edit and proofread the Chinese translation.

Urban studies has gone global - in the range of cities it considers, the scope of its theoretical ambition, and the breadth of practical concerns which now frame urban research. New topics, new subjects of theorization and new centers of analytical innovation shape the field.

Shifts in the dynamic sites of rapid global urbanization to Asia and Africa, along with the great diversity of forms of urban settlement, and the increasingly world-wide impacts of urbanization processes, have led many urbanists to propose a renewal, if not a fundamental transformation, in urban theory.

The traditional object of urban studies is arguably disappearing in the face of sprawling urban settlements and "planetary" urbanization processes. Cities, centers and suburbs become useless residual concepts, which must be used with circumspection and care. The field is in search of new vocabularies to engage with the extraordinary explosion and variety of urban forms – not just sprawling or extended, regional or mega, scholars reach for terms such as galactic and planetary to invoke the physical expansion and world-wide impact of urbanization.

In this light, a series of methodological and epistemological dilemmas face all urbanists and require creative and new responses. How can concepts be reviewed, renovated, overthrown or invented across diverse urban outcomes? How can urban theory work effectively with different cases, thinking with the diversity of the urban world? How can the complexity of the urban be addressed with concepts which are necessarily always reductionist? Concepts are inevitably confined by those who articulate them to always begin somewhere, to be spoken always in some particular voice - and yet concepts must grapple with the inexhaustibility of social and material worlds.

In this whirlwind of theoretical, empirical and political exploration of the nature of the global urban, my personal hunch has been that the inheritances of comparative practice might offer a starting point for critical theory-building. A comparative imagination could help to think the urban across its many diverse formations, and through its many interconnected outcomes. Both found and staged opportunities to bring different urban contexts into conversation could open up scope to explore this "impossible" (and impossibly varied) object, urban.

If a comparative imagination is to support the endeavors of a current generation of scholars eager to transform urban studies, something very different in the way of comparative methods will be needed - a reformatted comparison, fit for the challenges of a twenty-first century global urban studies.

This book sets out the case for a comparative approach which specifically builds from the problematic and spatiality of the urban as a global phenomenon. It argues for a comparative imagination which is open and agile, drawing comparative practice back to its core features: thinking with elsewhere, to interrogate and change concepts. On this basis, the book proposes both new grounds and new tactics for comparison that emerge intrinsically from the spatiality and form of contemporary urbanization. It establishes the basis on which one might draw different contexts into analytical encounters; and it sets out some specific tactics which can take forward a renovated and expansive process of theory-building, or more modestly, concept formation, for global urban studies.

This book rests on the core idea that we need to begin again with thinking about comparative method in relation to the urban, even as in many ways we need to begin again in thinking about the urban. Where might new concepts come from? A reformatted comparative practice moves beyond a territorialized imagination of comparing delineated and pre-given places ("cities") and builds on a view of the urban as emergent from the prolific circulations, trajectories, socio-material proximities and associational practices: whatever the urban is or becomes in any given context, it can be seen as emergent from all these possibilities.

In this sense, in the interests of critiquing, rebuilding and reinventing the conceptual repertoire of the field, our practices can respond to and work with the spatiality of the urban. A creative, open and critical perspective is crucial in comparative urbanism; not only is the urban a constantly changing, open historical formation but the terms on which we come to know it are also under constant debate and revision. The insight that the urban is a theoretical object (Brenner and Schmid, 2014), or a conceptual proposition, stimulates revisable propositions about the urban and reinforces a practice of urban studies which keeps open conversations across the global urban world.

The book is divided into four parts, including an introduction, eleven chapters, and a conclusion.

Part 1: Reformatting Comparison

The first part of the book interrogates the history and methodological principles of comparative urban practice. It makes the case for a reformatted urban comparative method, able to imagine starting to think the urban anywhere, in conversation with the multiple elsewheres of any urban situation.

Chapter One, Ways of knowing the global urban, outlines the need identified by urbanists for a renewed conceptualization of the urban in response to the deep challenges of global urbanization. The "problem" of contemporary global urbanisation calls for new kinds of theoretical practice (more diverse, but also more embedded and engaged with the urban world), which have the capacity to draw ideas, skills and resources to address how cities might be liveable for people and survivable for the planet.

Thus, Chapter 1 indicates how comparative urbanism might contribute to developing new approaches to understanding an expanding and diverse urban world, building concepts from many different perspectives and starting points, perhaps resonating with a range of different urban outcomes but being respectful of the limits of always located insights.

Chapter Two, The limits of comparative methodologies in urban studies, undertakes an exercise in reviewing and critiquing this methodological inheritance. Defining comparability on the basis of territorially delimited "cities", or according to features of the national contexts in which cities are located resulted in comparisons of only relatively similar kinds of cities. This placed significant limitations on the value of comparativism for global urban studies.

Counter to the ambitious scope and sometimes dominating authorial voice of a universalizing theoretical practice, eager to draw "elsewhere" in as evidence to support existing analytical agendas, a reformatted comparativism proposes a more agile theoretical practice. Such a practice would certainly engage with existing conceptualizations, but be committed to revisability, to thinking through a diversity of urban outcomes, and to being open to starting to conceptualize anew from anywhere.

Chapter Three, Comparative Urbanism in the archives: Thinking with variety, thinking with connection, dives into the archives of comparative urbanism to explore how scholars have actually undertaken comparisons when faced with the conundrums of thinking the urban. Composing comparisons or designing "natural experiments" by following the numerous interconnections and repeated instances across and amongst cities, as well as composing creative experiments across the variety of urban outcomes, both hold out much promise for creating new geographies of theorizing, which could help with the work of generating a more global urban studies.

Chapter Four, Thinking cities through elsewhere: Reformatting comparison, considers how to more formally ground the scope for urban comparisons on the basis of shared features and connections, variety and repetition.mThe chapter engages with both Marxist and Deleuzian formulations to explore this. Marxist approaches which emphasize the relational constitution of social and economic life can ground a way of thinking the urban through connections (wider processes and relations). But inspired by the fullness of the "concrete", and the inexhaustibility of social life, Marxist methods can also indicate an open horizon to understandings of urban life, and to concepts.

Deleuze offers some maneuvers which give scope for interrogating the meaning of a "case" in relation to wider processes, in relation to other cases, and to concepts in general. Rather than framing a case as a particular for a pre-given universal, in a representational or reflective idiom, his intervention invites us to track the intertwined genesis (emergence) of both matter and ideas. We could then consider each urban outcomes as distinctive, but possibly closely connected with many others through a shared genesis. Thus, by tracing the prolific interconnections amongst different urban phenomena, we are invited to place them in analytical relation. Matching this, Deleuze's philosophical intervention recasts the relationship between case and concept, inviting new ways forward for comparison.

Chapter 4 outlines two grounds for comparative urban practice, genetic and generative. These work with the intertwined production of the object urban in material emergence and conceptual endeavor. Comparisons might be thought of as developed on "genetic" grounds, tracing the interconnected genesis of repeated, related but distinctive, urban outcomes as the basis for comparison. Or they might emerge from "generative" practices, where variation across shared features evident in the midst of the rich fullness and complexity of urban life provides an invitation to generate conceptual insights across diverse urban outcomes.

Part 2: Genetic Comparisons

Part Two includes two chapters which explore the potential of "genetic" grounds for thinking the urban with elsewhere. Chapters 5 and 6 indicate opportunities where the spatiality of the genesis or emergence of the urban itself draws the researcher towards reflections across different contexts.

Chapter 5, Connections, sets out to address the question, what exactly might be done with connections, comparatively? Here, tracing the flows of people, things and ideas that constitute urbanization opens out to tactics including identifying and comparing different urbanization processes; and working comparatively with repeated instances in ways which might be empirically additive or analytically subtractive; or working across instances to thicken understanding of particular cases.

Chapter 6, Relations, considers connections through the lens of "relational" approaches which are more characteristic of political economy analyses. Most distinctively, in relational comparisons we are encouraged to work with the (translocal) social processes which link and jointly produce places and phenomena, especially in a globalized world. In this way understanding of shared, extensive, or wider processes is advanced.

Part 3: Generative Comparisons

Chapter Seven. Generating concepts. In coming to know or seeking to transform the diverse urban world, concepts are inevitable. This is a crucial premise of this chapter and this book. Certainly, concepts of the urban are hard won across diversity, difference and the material world, and urban comparativists have found resources in different perspectives and practices to navigate this tricky terrain.

How or on what grounds might concepts arise and be revised? How and why might concepts take hold and travel beyond the place where they were coined? What are we to make of the inevitable distance between concepts and things. For different theoretical traditions, then, the process of conceptualization is bound to the embedded experiences of researchers, and to the practices of urban scholars. The aim of this chapter is to bring clearly to the fore how concepts can be considered radically open to being revised, but also forged in situated engagements with the urban world.

Chapter 8, Composing, considers in turn, then, ways of approaching the urban as contingent, as specific, and as diverse. Marxist-inspired perspectives describe a potential to think with extensive social processes and formations which stretch across many different urban settings, treating urban cases as sites where different social processes converge, framing urban outcomes as "contingent" or as "conjunctures".

Different theoretical vocabularies frame different possibilities for thinking the urban, with elsewhere, which initiates experimental "conversations" across distinctive urban contexts in which each informs and enriches analyses of the others. Chapter 9, Conversations, explores a range of such experiments. As concepts emerge in relation to different urban contexts, their circulation and mobility draws attention to the agency of researchers in putting ideas on the move – or drawing concepts in to their contexts, to generate insights and invent new ways of thinking the urban.

Part 4: Thinking with the Urban as Distinctive

Chapter 10, Territories, opens to thinking with the fullness of urban territories to provoke comparative experiments. These could take shape across territories in a certain kind of relation to urbanization ("suburbs", or "peripheries" for example), or on the basis of the emergent territorializations of the urban which make up the increasingly fragmented, dispersed and extensive urban forms of contemporary "planetary" urbanization.

Chapter 10 justifies the potential to begin analysis of "the urban" in any urban territory, and any urban outcome, seen as distinctive. This is extremely important for conceptual innovation. The final chapter, Chapter 11, Into the territory, or, the urban as Idea, dives further "into the territory", to interrogate the detailed way in which Ideas, or concepts might be imagined to form in the close entwining of emergent (material) urban worlds and the active agency of the researcher.

Tracking genetic processes and embarking on generative explorations intertwine in the practice of comparing. Comparison is a challenging, slow and emergent research practice, in which the potential for comparison, the comparator, can be thought of as "assembled" across the elements of cases, wider literature, individual researchers, evidence gathered, interlocutors, not least collaborators, residents, practitioners, who have their own productive "wild" comparisons to put into the mix. Comparative tactics are part of a thick temporal field of emergent and processual method: the criteria, practices and phenomena which might initially stimulate enquiries may disappear from view. New concepts and entities might emerge along the way. And, in turn, these might morph into (new) good grounds for comparability. Formulating insightful comparisons on generative grounds can take a very long time!

Conclusion

This book builds comparative methodology from the spatiality of the urban: the full social worlds of territories; the interconnections that compose urban outcomes, differently each time; the diverse and emergent outcomes of urban processes, and from our practices as engaged, embodied and located researchers in specific urban contexts. After the fact, this methodological wager also signposts a process of theorization of the urban. But one in which conceptualizations of the urban – new vocabularies of urbanization - would necessarily be productively multiple. On this basis, global urban studies would become a field in which concepts are intrinsically highly revisable, where research is conducted in a modest authorial voice, and researchers are open to insights starting from anywhere.

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