The aim of this article is to critically assess the study of post-socialist cities with respect to comparative urbanism. Even though comparative urbanism has challenged the division of the world into largely incommensurable regional containers, where some regions are sources of theory while others remain in the periphery of thinking, post-socialist cities have remained doubly excluded: neither centre nor periphery, neither mainstream nor part of the critique. This article introduces three ways in which post-socialism has and could be perceived: as a container, as a condition and as a de-territorialized concept. It is argued here that seeing post-socialism as a de-territorialized concept that would apply to particular aspects of cities and societies rather than territorialized units in general would allow cities regularly seen as post-socialist to be incorporated into global urban theorizing, while distinctive local histories and experiences still remain analytically present. The arti cle cautions researchers against area-based imaginations of urban theorization, instead arguing in favour of an approach that sees cities first and foremost as ordinary while some aspects could be claimed to be post-socialist. Tallinn is used here as a site from which to draw examples for this mainly literature-based conceptual analysis.

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Urban research has long related informality to a lack of state capacity or a failure of institutions. This assumption not only fails to account for the heterogeneous institutional relations in which informality is embedded, but has also created a dividing line between states. Whereas some states are understood to manage urban development through functioning institutions, others, in this view, fail to regulate. To deconstruct such understandings, this article explores informal practices through a multi-sited individualizing comparison between three case studies of water governance, parking regulation and dwelling regimes in Bafatá (Guinea-Bissau), Tallinn (Estonia) and Berlin (Germany), respectively. Our approach to understanding informality starts from the negotiation and contestation of order between differently positioned actors in the continuous making of states. From this point of view, informality is inherent in the architecture of states--emerging through legal systems, embedded in negotiations between and within institutions, and based on conflicts between state regulations and prevailing norms. Tracing how order takes shape though negotiation, improvisation, co-production and translation not only highlights how informality constitutes a modus operandi in the everyday workings of the state in all three cases, but also provides a way to talk across these cases, i.e. to bring them together in one frame of analysis and overcome their presumed incommensurability.

Anybody wishing to position Bafatá (Guinea-Bissau), Berlin (Germany) and Tallinn (Estonia) side by side would encounter a number of reasons why these cities should not be compared. To unmake such hesitations, this article offers a conceptual and methodological exploration of the ways in which these cities might be analysed comparatively through a methodological strategy termed multi-sited individualising comparison. This exploratory approach allows to talk across individual research projects in different sites. In applying this methodology to Bafatá, Berlin and Tallinn, the authors demonstrate how case studies in these different cities can be compared around a common interest, namely informal processes and their relations to states.

In this article, we study the largest existing fare-free public transport (FFPT) programme, launched in 2013 in Tallinn, Estonia. Instead of focusing solely on the rationale and impact of fare-free public transport in terms of finances and travel patterns, we propose to analyse FFPT from the perspective of urban political geography, and to inquire into its political and scalar dynamics. We analyse how Tallinn's fare-free programme was developed, and demonstrate the politics of its conception and implementation. We observe who has access to free travel and we reveal how FFPT is embedded in Estonia's place-of-residence-based taxation system. Finally, we identify where lies the impact of territorial competition exacerbated by FFPT. Therefore, we argue that transport policies -of which FFPT is but an example -should be understood as much more than strategies dealing with transport issues per se. Instead, we propose to approach them as political and spatial projects, whose processual, cross-sectorial and scalar dimensions help to