Strategies for relating diverse cities: A multi-sited individualising comparison of informality in Bafatá, Berlin and Tallinn

Abstract

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.

Writing Across Contexts: Urban Informality and the State in Tallinn, Bafatá and Berlin

“…But rather than being selected according to these or other categories, our joint analytical interest brought us into a conversation about the ways in which a meaningful frame of analysis would enable a joint understanding of informal processes in different contexts. Each co‐author contributed a case study to this conversation, based on individual research (for a more detailed explanation of this approach, see Tuvikene et al ., ).…”

Between appropriation and occupation: the spatial politics of “squatting” in East Berlin

“…In the case of the 'socialist city', this is an optic that has the potential to challenge the limited role that the socialist era has traditionally played in accounts of post-socialist urban transformation. A commitment to re-thinking the nature of the post-socialist city is dependent, in other words, on a methodological attitude that is "informed by the histories and practices of particular places" rather than a pro forma reading of these places as seen through the lens of "economic transition, marketization or neo-liberalization" (Gentile, forthcoming; see Tuvikene et al, 2017).…”

The Global Urban: Difference and Complexity in Urban Studies and the Science of Cities

“…Here the invitation is to invent new concepts, to generate understandings relevant to distinctive urban situations, which would be available to launch into a wider world of urban conceptualization, possibly to be put to work in new situations. In this vein, for example, the concepts of informality, so characteristic of many poorer cities, have generated a hugely productive approach to emergent urban social formations in many contexts (Simone, 2001;Le Galès, 2011;Schindler, 2013;Hentschel, 2015;Tuvikene, Neves Alves and Hilbrandt, 2016). There are quite some openings, then, for urban social theory to recraft itself in the face of the differentiated, changing and globalizing urban world.…”