Practising comparative urbanism: Methods and consequences

Abstract

This paper addresses methodological approaches to comparative urban geography and the consequences of such approaches. It demonstrates three ways by which an imaginative comparison can be constructed and employed: letting the sites speak to one another, repeated instance analysis, and tracing. Successfully employing these methods requires adopting comparison as both an implicit ethos and explicit approach during data collection and analysis, answering “why is it different here?” Reflecting on the impact of utilising comparative approaches, I argue that comparative urbanism helps balance the unique and ubiquitous conclusions from research, and forces researchers to question the norms or assumptions they hold from doing singular case study research, which in turn foregrounds the situational nature of urban governance in analysis. In the specifics of this paper, it also helps uncover assumptions around the power of state and reveals (some) global elite urban networks.

Constructing comparisons: Reflecting on the experimental nature of new comparative tactics

“…To take forward the comparative approach the papers in this special issue demonstrate the potential of experimental approaches – challenging how we do comparison, where and what we put into these conversations from our own positionality and history. On this basis, authors bring forward comparative experiments and innovative theoretical insights by making their approaches adaptive (see Brill, 2021; Niranjana, 2022; Teo, 2022). Experimenting and adopting an experimental ethos towards research design and implementation offers a way to embody the radical potential of critical geography and urban studies.…”

“…For advocates speaking from places less well represented in urban studies, thinking from or with the elsewhere is a way of overcoming the limitations of heavily hierarchical understandings of cities and the related dominance of particular places in informing theorisations. In my own work, for example, I have had to justify why it matters to not translate currencies always back to the US dollar – even if this would make it more palatable for American and other audiences (Brill, 2021). Comparison, in my case putting into conversation sites in London and Johannesburg, looking for instances of repetition and leading with the question of ‘why is it not like that here’ can bring in the everywhere, the anywhere and the elsewhere through continual self-reflective practices of awareness – creating unpredictable and unexpected comparisons.…”

“…For Robinson (2016), there are clear means by which the comparative agenda can be put into practice – tracing connections across places, starting from places relatively neglected in wider analyses, and thinking through difference. As I have argued elsewhere, assembling a method for comparison can productively draw these three approaches together to create a generative multi-pronged approach to comparison (Brill, 2021). However, to push forward comparative urbanism means opening to a wider range of methods (see Streule, 2020) and in this commentary I reflect on the experimental nature of many of the methods discussed in this special issue.…”

Comparative urbanism in times of Covid‐19 and beyond

“…In what follows, we revisit current debates on comparative urbanism, which critically engage with prevalent approaches within comparative urban studies and geography. These debates demonstrate an increasing awareness of how we do comparative urbanism (Brill, 2022): how we structure our comparison defines what we see and how we come to understand difference and similarity across sites. As researchers working with comparative perspectives, we therefore have to be mindful of how methodological choices influence the potential for (1) generating knowledge based on a particular city, (2) concluding how the contribution of the individual city can generate a more broadly applicable understanding of the urban (Beauregard, 2020; Pickvance, 2001; Robinson, 2011; Tilly, 1984; Ward, 2010) and (3) how individual cities are comprised by, linked to, and influenced by broader spatial processes.…”

Reimagining climate networking between cities: clustering cities based on a large dataset of mitigation actions

“…Despite the evolution of urban climate governance [14], the field is mainly reliant on qualitative analysis of a few case studies [15] (for a few exceptions, refer to [2,16]) or focuses on specific regions [17][18][19][20] or global cities [16,21,22]. Expanding our understanding of cities requires moving beyond conventional comparisons and placing different contexts into the conversation [13,[23][24][25]. One way to do this is to move from case studies of a few cities to large data-driven analyses that include a range of diverse cities [26] with a clear inclusivity purpose [27].…”