Comparative Urbanism
- LAST MODIFIED: 24 September 2020
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199874002-0221
- LAST MODIFIED: 24 September 2020
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199874002-0221
Introduction
“Comparative urbanism” refers to research that acknowledges the diversity of urban experiences, avoids assumptions of theoretical best fits prior to any investigation, and develops knowledge through close engagement with the diverse empirical reality. Comparative urbanism is a topic long in the making, but also rapidly emerging since the early 2000s. Led by urban studies journals such as Urban Geography and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, with multiple special issues on the theme, the line of research has aimed to expand the horizons of thinking on cities. Writing against a Euro-American mainstream that focuses on a limited number of major American or European cities for conceptualization and theory-making, through work by authors such as Jennifer Robinson, Ananya Roy, Colin McFarlane, and others, comparative urbanism proposes to take every city as potentially useful for theorization. Embarking from foundational works by scholars such as Charles Tilly, Janet Abu-Lughod, or Charles Pickvance, comparative urbanism tackles the existing perspectives and expands the urban theorization and empirical learning base beyond the Global North. Hence, many of the proponents of comparative urbanism have their roots in existing area studies. On the one hand, comparative urbanism is a caution for area-based studies to avoid being boxed into narrow scholarly niches. On the other hand, comparative urbanism has enabled a louder voice for area studies scholars, providing them with a more cutting-edge position in the field. Nevertheless, the target of comparative urbanism is not simply to put cities “off the map” on the map (and “back” on the map), but to revise the direction of theory-making and the conceptual development. Namely, instead of seeing theories emerging in abstract, the theorization always involves thinking from concrete cases. Mostly, however, those concrete examples at the center of such conceptual advances have been London, Chicago, or Los Angeles, instead of Johannesburg, Moscow, Mumbai, Tallinn, or Bafatá. Comparative urbanism, then, argues to switch the perspective, which does not simply expand the scope of empirical material, but also enlarges the set of questions to be asked, insights provided, and conceptualizations raised. Thus, a revised urban studies offered by comparative urbanism scholarship entails shifts in ways of doing research, and particularly the ways of comparative analysis. Instead of simply building from preexisting theory toward cases, more innovative methods of research should be envisioned. That includes unexpected comparisons of cases considered previously incommensurable or comparisons that invent new ways of narrating understandings of cities and urban processes. Such a challenge toward the taken-for-granted practices of research has not taken place uncontested, but has rather invited critiques from those defending existing conceptual frameworks, theory-making, and verification practices. Nevertheless, the proposal for comparative urbanism has found its place in urban studies and is increasingly receiving novel theory-inspired empirical insights and conceptual revisions.
Historical Foundations and Major Influences
Comparison is at the center of any research, and so the problem of what and how to compare has a long history for urban research. Which cities could reasonably be put side by side to draw out their similarities and differences, and what kind of assumptions lead such comparative exercises? Also, what exactly is compared and what are the elements of comparison? The classic works Abu-Lughod 1975, Abu-Lughod 1999, Pickvance 1986, and Tilly 1984 highlight three different elements for urban studies: Pickvance favors the methodological intricacies of proper comparative analysis; Tilly the difference of comparison for system creation from individualized case-based comparisons; and Abu-Lughod, who is the most prominent of these three within comparative urbanism, explores the value of in-depth and historically positioned comparative case studies. Much of the classic work is driven by the question of how to write across the “three worlds”: the First, Second, and Third Worlds. Thus, Communist countries—the “Second World”—were also important for comparative urban researchers, constituting a serious theoretical question for scholars of the time about the socialist difference, which challenged (or confirmed) the validity of their theoretical constructs: whether socialist countries were just a minor variance to the general trend of cities, or something fundamentally different. The argument for the latter, without yet succumbing to the solipsistic area studies perspective, led R. A. French, and F. E. Ian Hamilton, together with other scholars, to work out the concept of the “socialist city” (see French and Hamilton 1979). This notion later morphed into the “postsocialist city.” Globalization, then, has arguably brought places together. Indeed, globalization constitutes a key topic for comparative research, raising questions of convergence (Dick and Rimmer 1998), as well as arguments of variation due to the different paths of local histories despite similar backgrounds of places (Hart 2002). And what could be more converged than the global cities. However, Abu-Lughod 1999 particularly complicated the narratives of global cities by showing the contingent history and emergence, as well as uncertainty, of becoming “global” and the variations of what otherwise seems like unitary category of “global cities.” Pickvance 1986 provides a way to advance studies that are at the same time general and specific by offering the frame of plural causation: analysis of how similar phenomena are a result of different causes. The same logic leads Paul Kantor and H. V. Savitch to the utilization of mid-level theories—such as bargaining—for understanding similar trends across variation (Kantor and Savitch 2005). These antecedents to comparative urbanism provided core structures and questions for the later theoretical and practical elaborations.
Abu-Lughod, Janet. “The Legitimacy of Comparisons in Comparative Urban Studies: A Theoretical Position and an Application to North African Cities.” Urban Affairs Review 11.1 (1975): 13–35.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Through her in-depth empirical work, Abu-Lughod questioned the at-the-time prevalent evolutionary approach to cities that positioned a singular narrative of urban development at the center. She highlights the importance of the emergence of various forms of urbanism outside European and American centers. In order to understand these forms of urbanism, a unitary historical path of development is not preferable, and attention should be directed instead to the close scrutiny of common mechanisms, which are not necessarily converging but can also lead to divergence.
Find this resource:
Abu-Lughod, Janet. New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America’s Global Cities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A dense and thorough account of longer histories of global cities through past ups and downs of three major metropolises in the United States. While this books looks at US cities, Abu-Lughod is very attentive to the importance of local political histories of some of the most metonymic of global cities, including their global character and associated elements that have long histories as well as unique geographies.
Find this resource:
Dick, H. W., and P. J. Rimmer. “Beyond the Third World City: The New Urban Geography of South-east Asia.” Urban Studies 35.12 (1998): 2303–2321.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This article examines Southeast Asian development through convergence and divergence, which have varied throughout precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial history. Urban studies of that time still had a strong preference for the generalizing narrative of the Third World city, but, as the authors maintain, the process of globalization has made this approach obsolete for Southeast Asian cities. Thus, the article favors a more widely applicable theorization instead of studying cities in their area studies conceptual perspective.
Find this resource:
French, R. A., and F. E. Ian Hamilton. “Is There a Socialist City?” In The Socialist City: Spatial Structure and Urban Policy. Edited by R. A. French, and F. E. Ian Hamilton, 1–21. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 1979.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Writing in a context where active debates between approaches favoring unitary social studies and those differentiating socialist urban developments from the capitalist ones, these authors make the point for the latter. Writing through historical models of a “socialist city” and underlying ideological as well as economic factors of city building, French and Hamilton favor analysis that notes internal integrity of the socialist system of cities and difference from the rest of the world.
Find this resource:
Hart, Gillian. Disabling Globalization: Places of Power in Post-apartheid South Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
An in-depth study of two locations in South Africa—industrial development points Ladysmith-Ezakheni and Newcastle—in close economic interplay with Taiwan. The book challenges understandings of globalization as working externally on the conditions of place. The book thus maps the divergence of two places where, in globally connected post-apartheid neoliberalism, the divergent relations with the past together with local tensions lead to multiple trajectories.
Find this resource:
Kantor, Paul, and H. V. Savitch. “How to Study Comparative Urban Development Politics: A Research Note.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29.1 (2005): 135–151.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2427.2005.00575.xSave Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Taking a more systematic analytic lens than is common for much of urban studies, the paper notes the lack of comparisons in the field. The challenge, however, is to develop rigorous and consistent analysis with potential replication while still maintaining contextual sensitivity. The article argues for the use of bargaining as an analytical framing—a mid-level theory—that enables to see how a common process varies across cases, contexts, and scales.
Find this resource:
Pickvance, Chris G. “Comparative Urban Analysis and Assumptions about Causality.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 10.2 (1986): 162–184.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Pickvance offers a systemic and argumentative study in favor of comparative analysis, which he differentiates from comparative research: comparative analysis is not simply about similarities and differences, but also seeks to analyze different models. Developing through the work of historical thinkers such as J. S. Mill, he highlights the importance of plural causation: the same phenomena could be caused by multiple effects in different systems.
Find this resource:
Tilly, Charles. Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1984.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
While not an urban-oriented study itself, this book has functioned as inspiration for various comparative urbanism works (see, in particular, the writings by Jennifer Robinson). The division of comparisons to individualizing, universalizing, variation-finding, and encompassing has provided an influential methodological grounding for urban comparisons.
Find this resource:
Postcolonial Approaches to Comparative Urbanism
Comparative urbanism as it is currently known started in the early 2000s, particularly with the work of Jennifer Robinson, whose 2006 book Ordinary Cities (cited under Agenda-Setting Pieces) set the tone for further thinking. This section comprises a number of subsections. In the first, an overview of key works is given. This is followed by debates about comparative urbanism as the field has matured to a state that it has also attracted some prominent critical voices and, of course, lines of defense. This is followed by a section on methodological advances, which are at the core of the comparative agenda of this research strand. Comparison is a methodology, and new ways of comparisons entail innovative thinking on what to bring together and how to analyze. The final subsection discusses planetary urbanization, which emerged later than comparative urbanism but has more recently developed in parallel. While some would argue similarities of the two fields, it is maintained here that they diverge in important ways. Nevertheless, planetary urbanization has offered one line of comparative thinking, which has challenged centralization to difference and instead suggested bringing cities—essentially all cities—as well as areas outside cities together into one analytic framework centered around the “urban.”
Agenda-Setting Pieces
Despite more than a decade of literature, comparative urbanism is still a novel topic and is only now seeing general overviews or textbooks. As the research field is still very much in process, there is little about it in textbooks. From the handbooks on the topic, one of the most authoritative is The Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South (2014), edited by Parnell and Oldfield. It brings together most of the key scholars on comparative urbanism, but also fellow travelers on the theme. There are various collections, such as Edensor and Jayne 2012, with cases from around the world offering critical accounts of urban theory from diverse perspectives beyond the West. Nevertheless, there are various foundational papers and some books that have set the agenda of the scholarship. These approaches offer critical challenges to the existing power relations in theory-making. Particularly noteworthy is the 2006 book Ordinary Cities by Jennifer Robinson, but of equal relevance are an earlier paper, Robinson 2002, and a later elaboration, Robinson 2011 (cited under Doing Comparative Urbanism: Methodological Advances). Similarly, papers by Ananya Roy (Roy 2009 and Roy 2011) have argued for the importance of comparative thinking by making her claims through research on and about Asian cities. Nijman 2007 and Ward 2010 developed new strategies of comparison, while McFarlane 2010, as well as a strand of research known as “policy mobilities,” developed new understandings on the travel of ideas and policies from place to place, and how such mobilities matter for urban development. Ward 2010 makes clear that comparison as such, placing one aspect against another, is less of importance for comparative urbanist than being “relationally” comparative: thinking of cities in constant interrelations. Cities are put in ongoing interaction by copying ideas from place to place and through travel of symbolic and physical elements, including people.
Edensor, Tim, and Mark Jayne, eds. Urban Theory beyond the West: A World of Cities. London and New York: Routledge, 2012.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
The edited book attends, through a variety of cases, to the ways in which cities are organized, managed, and regulated beyond entrenched understandings embedded in Western urban experiences. The collection critically interrogates the taken-for-granted understandings of what constitutes “Western” and “non-Western” urban regulations, instead suggesting to move urban theory “beyond the [focus on the] West.”
Find this resource:
McFarlane, Colin. “The Comparative City: Knowledge, Learning, Urbanism.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34.4 (2010): 725–742.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2427.2010.00917.xSave Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
The paper is on learning, mislearning, and unlearning in cities and between cities. The paper importantly highlights the relevance of unlearning existing practices and developing new ways of thinking and comparing cities for postcolonial thinking. In line with many other postcolonial approaches of comparative urbanism, the paper favors messier and uncertain tactics to structured similarities-differences comparative approaches.
Find this resource:
McFarlane, Colin, and Jennifer Robinson. “Introduction: Experiments in Comparative Urbanism.” Urban Geography 33.6 (2012): 765–773.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
An introduction to a special issue offering alternative lines of comparative strategies beyond comparisons between most similar cities. Suggests opening up the field of urban studies to a diversity of places and also incorporating radical difference. The papers in the special issue bring different cities together by tracing connections, by seeing processes of replication, and by comparing similarities and differences across diverse cities.
Find this resource:
Nijman, Jan. “Introduction—Comparative Urbanism.” Urban Geography 28.1 (2007): 1–6.
DOI: 10.2747/0272-3638.28.1.1Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
An early paper on comparative urbanism, it works the field out against the traditional accounts of finding similarities and differences between cities. As an introduction to a special issue in the journal Urban Geography, the paper sets the scene for postcolonial comparative studies. The comparative approach favored in the paper is interpretive, diverging from the traditional sociological law-like explanations.
Find this resource:
Parnell, Susan, and Sophie Oldfield. The Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South. London: Routledge, 2014.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
An extensive and rich account of a variety of aspects and cities of the Global South. The book is a showcase for perspectives from the studies “beyond the West.” Worlding cities, centralizing the ordinary, and working toward Southern conceptualizations are the core of the book. The book questions the overlooking of rapidly growing cities, for which the frameworks emanating from industrialized cities of the Global North are not suited. One needs also to conceptualize traditional authority, religious identity, and informality.
Find this resource:
Robinson, Jennifer. “Global and World Cities: A View from Off the Map.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 26.3 (2002): 531–554.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
One of the earlier papers to suggest a radical move away from categorizing cities and to decolonize urban studies. The paper takes world and global city literature as its target and criticizes the ways such literatures are used in policy circles by noting the persistent designation of large parts of the urban world to a category of cities remaining off the map.
Find this resource:
Robinson, Jennifer. Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A landmark work on postcolonial urban studies. The book works against the domination of global cities’ scholarship and offers critiques of developmentalism and modernization by providing inspiration for novel and alternative urban conceptualization from the perspective of cities off the map. Drawing inspiration from urban anthropologies, the book suggests seeing every city—including global and world cities—as ordinary.
Find this resource:
Roy, Ananya. “The 21st-Century Metropolis: New Geographies of Theory.” Regional Studies 43.6 (2009): 819–830.
DOI: 10.1080/00343400701809665Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Building from the concept of “strategic essentialism” developed in postcolonial theory, the article offers a critical and productive account of theorizations from and beyond area studies, with the theories located somewhere and dis-located at the same time. Informality is one of the conceptual frameworks advanced in the paper. The article argues for moving theory-making much more to take into account the realities of the Global South.
Find this resource:
Roy, Ananya. “Slumdog Cities: Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35.2 (2011): 223–238.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2427.2011.01051.xSave Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Writing from the perspective of megacities as the “constitutive outside”—the subaltern—for urban studies, the paper questions the use of slums as metonyms for Southern cities. The paper rethinks subaltern urbanism through four concepts: peripheralities, informality as a mode of production of space, grey spaces, and zones of exceptions. All these notions are not uniquely produced from the Global South, but they offer a different vantage point for comprehending urbanism.
Find this resource:
Ward, Kevin. “Towards a Relational Comparative Approach to the Study of Cities.” Progress in Human Geography 34.4 (2010): 471–487.
DOI: 10.1177/0309132509350239Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
The paper came out at the start of the renaissance for comparative urbanism. In this piece, Ward draws out a novel comparative method—a relational comparative approach—sidestepping the traditional comparative approaches focused on rather narrow delimitation of similarities and differences. In relational approaches, cities are seen as stretching across space and made in interrelations. Taking such a perspective allows revising existing assumptions of key cities and offering new starting points for theorizing.
Find this resource:
Debating Comparative Urbanism
While initial suggestions to work toward more comparative and global urban studies were greeted with welcome, acceptance, and a feeling of empowerment in some circles—particularly those of area studies—they did not necessarily attract much attention in other research corners. More recently, however, some explicitly critical voices have emerged. These critiques perceive the existing mainstream of urban studies to provide enough theoretical foundation and at the same time voice concerns with the ways some central critiques by comparative urbanism have been framed. On the latter, van Meeteren, et al. 2016 criticizes the “strawman” perception of global cities scholarship by comparative urbanists. As Peck 2015 notes, building new conceptualizations from new cases necessarily translates to a pulverization of concepts, and does so even to the extent that every city could equal a new theory. Moreover, Scott and Storper 2014 and Storper and Scott 2016 maintain that many—if not all relevant—theorizations for understanding cities are already there: cities of the Global South and Global North alike are all shaped by forces of agglomeration. Some comparative urbanism scholars have responded to these critiques. Roy 2016 highlights the difference between comparative urbanism and—for the lack of a better term—mainstream urban studies approaches. Building from this observation, Derickson 2015 (cited under Interrogating Planetary Urbanization and Comparative Urbanism) makes the substantial argument that claims arguing for the preexistence of theories just cannot fit with the ambition and aims of comparative urbanism. In many ways, the core assumptions possessed by those critical of comparative urbanism are fundamentally incompatible with the principal arguments of this scholarship. Namely, comparative urbanism can never accept the closure of theories prior to some new empirical investigations. No concepts or theories are waiting on the shelf to be applied, and never could they be readily applied all over the world. Instead, theories and conceptualizations are revised in the course of doing (empirically oriented) research. This understanding is an invitation for revised methods and approaches, which is discussed in the following section. Moreover, the excessive focus on economy and economic processes by Scott and Storper and others has invited counter-critiques defending comparative urbanism, prominently in Mould 2016. Some works, such as Jacobs 2012, argue for productive interplay between comparative urbanism approaches and relational and assemblage-oriented urban geographies. Jazeel 2016 defends area studies for its close empirical scrutiny and practically engaged work, whereas Sidaway, et al. 2016 suggests an emergence of a new and more elaborate area studies with comparative urbanism and postcolonial framings.
Jacobs, Jane M. “Urban Geographies I: Still Thinking Cities Relationally.” Progress in Human Geography 36.3 (2012): 412–422.
DOI: 10.1177/0309132511421715Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
An influential and widely used piece advocating a relational approach of urban comparisons, with lessons from Deleuze and Guattari and assemblage approaches, actor-network theories, and other post-structural conceptualizations. The cities in this approach are elements of networks and in constant making through different mobilities, where one needs to attend not only to the transfer, but also the non-transfer, as well as mutation, of policies.
Find this resource:
Jazeel, Tariq. “Between Area and Discipline: Progress, Knowledge Production and the Geographies of Geography.” Progress in Human Geography 40.5 (2016): 649–667.
DOI: 10.1177/0309132515609713Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
The paper works across the tensions between universalism of disciplinary narratives and particularisms attending to specific tensions the research sites entail. Locally engaged researcher are usually in an embedded position, where they stay close to researched individuals and topics. The paper defends area studies as a useful platform for initial insights and observations, as well as fields with their own rich history of research.
Find this resource:
Mould, Oli. “A Limitless Urban Theory? A Response to Scott and Storper’s ‘The Nature of Cities: The Scope and Limits of Urban Theory.’” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 40.1 (2016): 157–163.
DOI: 10.1111/1468-2427.12288Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
The paper questions Scott and Storper’s focus on agglomeration for its too instrumental, deterministic, and economistic approach. Embedding cities in meta-narratives makes difference into mere diversity, external to a conceptualization of cities. Instead, such differences should be an inherent part of thinking about cities conceptually.
Find this resource:
Peck, Jamie. “Cities beyond Compare?” Regional Studies 49.1 (2015): 160–182.
DOI: 10.1080/00343404.2014.980801Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
One of the most influential papers in taking a critical stance toward comparative urbanism. The paper criticizes provincializing approaches for their particularism and aversion toward abstraction. Peck points out the need for preset theorizations in order to avoid a centralization of difference across cases, thus positioning universal theories and concepts at the center of research.
Find this resource:
Roy, Ananya. “Who’s Afraid of Postcolonial Theory?” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 40.1 (2016): 200–209.
DOI: 10.1111/1468-2427.12274Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Responding directly to the critiques of postcolonial urban studies (e.g., Storper and Scott, Peck), Roy shows how the main aim of comparative urbanism is not seeking empirical variation, but rather transforming general categories. This is all the more so as the postcolonial approach of comparative urbanism is not merely about the “postcolony” itself, but also re-narrating the West.
Find this resource:
Scott, Allen J., and Michael Storper. “The Nature of Cities: The Scope and Limits of Urban Theory.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 39.1 (2014): 1–15.
DOI: 10.1111/1468-2427.12134Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
The paper provided one of the earliest critiques of comparative urbanism. It argues for seeing theory-making as separate from empirical research and presumes there to already be enough theoretical foundations for case studies. The paper sees threats of a new particularism, and thus makes economic processes and agglomeration the foundational forces of urbanization and the conceptual and theoretical core that can be used in the Global South as much as in the Global North.
Find this resource:
Sidaway, James D., Elaine L. Ho, Jonathan D. Rigg, and Chih Yuan Woon. “Area Studies and Geography: Trajectories and Manifesto.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34.5 (2016): 777–790.
DOI: 10.1177/0263775816656520Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Noting the close interplay of geography and area studies, the article favors third-wave area studies, which is “more conscious of the politics of representation” (p. 779), questions the boundaries of areas, and is attendant to transnationalism more than the first two waves: imperial and Cold War area studies. The paper suggests learning from Benedict Anderson to stage comparisons that work with relations such as difference/similarity, expectancy/surprise, present/past, and familiarity/strangeness.
Find this resource:
Storper, Michael, and Allen J. Scott. “Current Debates in Urban Theory: A Critical Assessment.” Urban Studies 53.6 (2016): 1114–1136.
DOI: 10.1177/0042098016634002Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Storper and Scott expand on and respond to their earlier paper by challenging three recent trends of urban studies: postcolonial urban theory, assemblage approaches, and planetary urbanization. Targeting the first of these, they criticize the exaggeration of complaints regarding urban studies’ “Euro-American epistemological bias.” They also question the critiques of modernism-developmentalism and challenge theoretically unstructured comparativism lacking conceptual work before one embarks on actual comparisons.
Find this resource:
van Meeteren, Michael, Ben Derudder, and David Bassens. “Can the Straw Man Speak? An Engagement with Postcolonial Critiques of ‘Global Cities Research.’” Dialogues in Human Geography 6.3 (2016): 247–267.
DOI: 10.1177/2043820616675984Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
The paper offers critiques of postcolonial approaches that simplify global cities research. The authors advocate using a much wider set of scholarship than taking earlier accounts of global cities hierarchies and influential promotional advocacy as standing for all of the global cities research. The paper claims that the global cities scholarship is essentially open to diversity, and thus, instead of being antagonistic, shares similar aims as postcolonial and ordinary cities’ studies.
Find this resource:
Doing Comparative Urbanism: Methodological Advances
Comparative urbanism is not simply about comparing one case to another. Instead, the revision of existing theory-making practices and conceptualizations entails also rethinking how one writes about cities. The key works of comparative urbanism are indeed attentive to methods. Robinson 2011 and Robinson 2016, for instance, build grounds for comparative tactics and strategies for thinking from the Global South. A very distinctive and inspirational account is proposed by AbdouMaliq Simone. A prominent advocate for comparative urbanism, Simone has provided novel language and perspective to cities from an African or Southeast Asian point of view (Simone 2010; see also Simone 2004, cited in African Cities in Comparative Urbanism). Original ways of comparisons mean developing new conceptual tools and even inventive language (Deville, et al. 2016). Thus, Myers 2014, for instance, builds from Chinese concepts to understand African cities. Following calls for methodological innovation, Schmid, et al. 2018 offers novel processual concepts through an extensive team-based comparative exercise. The unexpected comparisons advocated by Myers are also what invite moving beyond the thesis of incommensurability of cities with a preference for comparing like for like. Moreover, the proper comparison across diverse cities is complicated by difficulties resulting from finding common grounds and the necessity of resources for such a task. Thus, Tuvikene, et al. 2017 provides a multi-sited individualizing comparison, wherein different cities as well as topics within those sites are brought side by side. In such a comparison, instead of having all terms and parameters preset, these need to be in development to produce insights valid across varied cases. A good example of a cross-continental comparison of intercity relations is provided by Söderström 2014. Another good example is Rokem and Boano 2017, which offers a lesson on using comparative urbanism thinking in an emerging field the authors conceptualize as comparative urban geopolitics.
Deville, Joe, Michael Guggenheim, and Zuzana Hrdličková, eds. Practising Comparison: Logics, Relations, Collaborations. Manchester, UK: Mattering Press, 2016.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
An open-access book with a collection of papers defending and exploring comparison as a method for sociological, anthropological, and urban studies’ research. The book takes comparison as the primary way of doing any research and goes through the practices of comparative exercise through lessons from actor-network theory, science and technology studies, urban studies, and other fields.
Find this resource:
McFarlane, Colin, Jonathan Silver, and Yaffa Truelove. “Cities within Cities: Intra-Urban Comparison of Infrastructure in Mumbai, Delhi and Cape Town.” Urban Geography 38.9 (2017): 1393–1417.
DOI: 10.1080/02723638.2016.1243386Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
The paper offers a methodological framing termed “intra-urban comparison” to challenge the perceived coherence and boundedness of cities. Intra-urban comparison provides pathways for urban comparisons through aspects (rather than cities as such). It stresses the potential of finding variation within cities and not just between cities.
Find this resource:
Myers, Garth. “From Expected to Unexpected Comparisons: Changing the Flows of Ideas about Cities in a Postcolonial Urban World.” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 35.1 (2014): 104–118.
DOI: 10.1111/sjtg.12046Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Instead of merely focusing on criticizing unequal theorizing and comparison, the paper pushes further for novel possibilities of comparative approaches, either by starting from Global South in South-to-North comparisons or carrying out South-South comparisons. The paper stresses the need to be attentive to the undetermined and changing aspects of cities where unpredictability is a key factor. Thus, cities all over the world should be placed on the same analytical plane, with the field open to unexpected comparisons.
Find this resource:
Robinson, Jennifer. “Cities in a World of Cities: The Comparative Gesture.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35.1 (2011): 1–23.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2427.2010.00982.xSave Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Robinson highlights the Euro-American urban studies’ consensus that results in rendering a large number of cities largely irrelevant for theory. To counter such trends, the paper offers to enlarge the comparative imagination by moving beyond assumed incommensurability and build new comparative strategies. The paper invites researchers to take comparisons as more open-ended and potentially even building on single cases—the latter through making conceptual connections through comparative gestures.
Find this resource:
Robinson, Jennifer. “Thinking Cities through Elsewhere: Comparative Tactics for a More Global Urban Studies.” Progress in Human Geography 40.1 (2016): 3–29.
DOI: 10.1177/0309132515598025Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
The paper urges urban studies to proceed first and foremost comparatively, but also to extend the repertoire of comparative methods. Thus, Robinson works out two comparative tactics: generative comparisons and genetic ones. While genetic comparisons trace the emergence of a concept, generative ones build all sorts of connections across cases to launch new conceptualizations through conceptual leaps. Both approaches work toward open-ended and unexpected comparisons starting from anywhere.
Find this resource:
Rokem, Jonathan, and Camillo Boano, eds. Urban Geopolitics: Rethinking Planning in Contested Cities. London: Routledge, 2017.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
The edited collection attends to the emerging theme of urban geopolitics by taking a postcolonial, comparative, and ordinary cities perspective. With each chapter comparative in outset, the book seeks to work beyond incommensurability and global regional divides. Advancing an understanding of production of space as a conflicting process, the book offers examples of using a comparative urbanism framework and thinking in urban geopolitics.
Find this resource:
Schmid, C., Ozan Karaman, Naomi C. Hanakata, et al. “Towards a New Vocabulary of Urbanisation Processes: A Comparative Approach.” Urban Studies 55.1 (2018): 19–52.
DOI: 10.1177/0042098017739750Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Schmid and colleagues introduce a comparative research project with a strategy not fixated on individual cases nor embedded in preexisting concepts. Instead, their approach offers a comparison of processes in dialectical relationship between theory and empirics. The research project relied on intensive map-based qualitative fieldwork with collaborative project meetings leading to new processual concepts such as popular urbanization, plotting urbanism, multilayered patchwork urbanization, and incorporation of urban differences.
Find this resource:
Simone, AbdouMaliq. City Life from Jakarta to Dakar: Movements at the Crossroads. New York and London: Routledge, 2010.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
In this book, Simone takes his standard approach of cities as emergent and sites of possibility through various sites across the Global South. In the book, the periphery becomes a source of ideas and novel practices—it is a generative space. The comparative approach is not about directly setting cities side by side, but rather writing across them by attending to people’s practices in facing different economic and political challenges.
Find this resource:
Söderström, Ola. Cities in Relations: Trajectories of Urban Development in Hanoi and Ouagadougou. Chichester UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Empirically rich analysis of relations between two cities across space and over a period of twenty years. In an approach inspired by actor-network theory, Söderström tracks relations between cities, even if finding such connections turns out not to be particularly easy. The book is also valuable for the ways it provides inspiration for methodological approaches by attending to cities on different continents.
Find this resource:
Tuvikene, Tauri, Susana Neves Alves, and Hanna Hilbrandt. “Strategies for Relating Diverse Cities: A Multi-Sited Individualising Comparison of Informality in Bafatá, Berlin and Tallinn.” Current Sociology 65.2 (2017): 276–288.
DOI: 10.1177/0011392116657298Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This paper offers methodological deliberations on building comparative insights with limited financial means and across, at first sight, incommensurable cities. The paper argues for a multi-sited individualizing comparison wherein conceptualizations are built on a sufficiently abstract level to unite diverse cases as much as possible. Informality constitutes a conceptual lens that the paper remodels, so that the notion will function across one city in West Africa, a metropolis in the center of Europe, and a capital city of a formerly Soviet country.
Find this resource:
Interrogating Planetary Urbanization and Comparative Urbanism
The reason for attending to the planetary urbanization here is its urge to have a more global view of cities that is quite similar to comparative urbanism. Key proponents of planetary urbanization (see, e.g., Schmid, et al. 2018, cited under Doing Comparative Urbanism: Methodological Advances) even claim these two research strands to be largely the same. Nevertheless, while both approaches share the urge to take a more planetary and extensive view of urban theory, they also have important divergences. While planetary urbanization proclaims to possess a theory and conceptualization that can then be utilized across the world (Brenner 2014, Brenner and Schmid 2014, Brenner and Schmid 2015), comparative urbanism is generative and at this stage just invites us to expand language and methods. Additionally, the research in line with planetary urbanization brands critical voices with focusing too much on cities as entities of studies per se, which Angelo and Wachsmuth 2015 calls “methodological cityism.” Planetary urbanization claims that the world is urbanized in all sorts of ways other than the mere expansion of cities further from the dense centers and beyond more and more people moving from rural areas to urban sites. Comparative urbanism, however, often attends to cities as political and administrative sites, but also as contested and multifaceted entities. Walker 2015 provides a prominent critique of planetary urbanization that questions the need for such a new theoretical framing, instead arguing for a need of more empirically oriented and practical research. There have also been studies skeptical of planetary urbanization from a comparative urbanism point of view, raising doubts about the extent to which planetary urbanization attends to the global variety of places and theory production from cities off the map (Schindler 2017). Thus, Derickson 2015 highlights the divergence between the two approaches wherein planetary urbanization is interlinked with critical studies of capitalism and comparative urbanism with post-structural approaches provincializing theory through subaltern approaches. Planetary urbanization indeed starts from a unitary analytical point—the complete urbanization of the world—which is analyzed through lens of critical urban scholarship. Comparative urbanism, however, starts from another angle: it moves to generalizations from the multiplicity of cases. In similar lines, other post-structural approaches, including feminist scholarship, have positioned themselves at odds with the planetary urbanization approach. Oswin 2018 and Reddy 2018, for example, voice skepticism of reducing urban studies to a singular voice. Thus, despite some similarities in the aims of planetary urbanization and comparative urbanism, they are still largely different projects within urban studies.
Angelo, Hillary, and David Wachsmuth. “Urbanizing Urban Political Ecology: A Critique of Methodological Cityism.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 39.1 (2015): 16–27.
DOI: 10.1111/1468-2427.12105Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
The paper argues for the increased relevance of urban political ecology, with its focus on resource flows and environmental challenges in the context of urban studies, wherein attention is shifting to extended urbanization. The paper proposes a move away from the present extensive focus on cities—dubbed “methodological cityism”—to urban processes.
Find this resource:
Brenner, Neil. Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization. Berlin: Jovis, 2014.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A collection of mostly previously published papers that collectively form a forceful argument for studies of planetary urbanization.
Find this resource:
Brenner, Neil, and Christian Schmid. “The ‘Urban Age’ in Question.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38.3 (2014): 731–755.
DOI: 10.1111/1468-2427.12115Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Brenner and Schmid write in relation to the popular thesis on the arrival of the “urban age,” structured around the understanding that more than 50 percent of earth’s population live in cities. The paper challenges the conceptual and methodological assumption of such a thesis and instead offers an alternative understanding based on planetary urbanization.
Find this resource:
Brenner, Neil, and Christian Schmid. “Towards a New Epistemology of the Urban?” City 19.2–3 (2015): 151–182.
DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2015.1014712Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
The paper offers seven theses for contemporary meta-theoretical understandings of the urban, setting urbanization as a theoretical category, as a process, and at the same time a concentrated, extended and differentiated, multidimensional, planetary and uneven, but also a collective project.
Find this resource:
Derickson, Kate D. “Urban Geography I: Locating Urban Theory in the ‘Urban Age.’” Progress in Human Geography 39.5 (2015): 647–657.
DOI: 10.1177/0309132514560961Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A position paper that highlights the differences between two influential meta-narratives and conceptualizations of urban developments in the contemporary world. As the paper posits, while planetary urbanization seeks a unitary narrative where capitalism and urbanization are interlinked, comparative urbanism is centered on a messier approach starting from different analytical points.
Find this resource:
Oswin, Natalie. “Planetary Urbanization: A View from Outside.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 36.3 (2018): 540–546.
DOI: 10.1177/0263775816675963Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Critical comments on planetary urbanization from a scholar drawing on queer and feminist approaches. The critique centralizes the extensive focus on capitalist relations in planetary urbanization and the omission of patriarchy, colonialism, racism, nationalism, and heteronormativity, which importantly also structure contemporary urban lives and make societies more unjust.
Find this resource:
Reddy, Rajyashree N. “The Urban under Erasure: Towards a Postcolonial Critique of Planetary Urbanization.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 36.3 (2018): 529–539.
DOI: 10.1177/0263775817744220Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
The paper problematizes the overall approach of planetary urbanization by questioning the centralization of one theory as the basis for exploring the planet. Moreover, the article questions the centralization of the urban in planetary urbanization, which otherwise seeks to challenge the urban/rural divide: it is “urban” that is extending and becoming planetary.
Find this resource:
Rickards, Lauren, Brendan Gleeson, Mark Boyle, and Cian O’Callaghan. “Urban Studies after the Age of the City.” Urban Studies 53.8 (2016): 1523–1541.
DOI: 10.1177/0042098016640640Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
An introduction to a virtual special issue that draws out a set of urban concepts under stress: the concepts that are reaching their limit. This discussion seeks to revise the field of urban studies, questioning the value and use of basic notions such as “city” or “urban hinterlands.” The paper maintains that even if the theoretical arguments have currency, “urban” remains a question of practical relevance for urban governing, which faces questions of climate change and flows under globalization.
Find this resource:
Schindler, Seth. “Towards a Paradigm of Southern Urbanism.” City 21.1 (2017): 47–64.
DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2016.1263494Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
The paper sees Southern cities as distinct cities, with their set of analytical and practical questions not answered by planetary urbanization (as such urban theorization favors empirically limited analysis), nor by postcolonial urban studies (as the “postcolonial” remains an empty signifier disconnected from the actual empirical realities). Instead, Southern urbanism highlights a set of problems for a more truly global urban studies.
Find this resource:
Walker, Richard. “Building a Better Theory of the Urban: A Response to ‘Towards a New Epistemology of the Urban?’” City 19. 2–3 (2015): 183–191.
DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2015.1024073Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
One of the important critical voices—even if some of those points are not always fully just toward their targets—questioning the theoretical novelty and conceptual applicability of the planetary urbanization thesis as offered and elaborated by Brenner and Schmid in a paper published in the same issue of the journal (Brenner and Schmid 2015).
Find this resource:
Reconceptualizing Regions from a Comparative Urbanism Perspective
Area studies have a long history in geography, urban studies, and various other parts of the social sciences. These studies have usually meant a focus outside the territory of Europe or North America, with these usually referred to as the taken-for-granted “normal” cities, societies, and political systems within the intellectual corpus of various disciplines. However, new debates seek to revise the existing boundaries and regional power relations, questioning the direction of theorization. There is an enormous scholarship on attending to one or more cities, as well as one or more aspects within the cities and urban constellations of Africa, Asia, the postsocialist world, Latin America, and so on and so forth. Nevertheless, the aim here is not simply to introduce such area studies scholarship. Instead, the focus is on studies that question the division between the center and the periphery from an area studies point of view, and to use close knowledge on the research sites to offer alternative directions of conceptualization. There are a number of such regional debates focusing on Asian cities, African and postsocialist regions, and Latin American urbanizations. A reconceptualization of existing regional constellations, however, is not only a matter concerning those regions; it also offers a challenge that urban studies needs to face and overcome as a field of research and practice. Indeed, any regional focus also creates omissions—of those left in the cracks between the dominant discourse and its critiques. That means the aim here is not to cover all possible regions, but to draw out some that have figured—more or less—in emerging comparative urbanism debates.
Conceptualizing “Postsocialism” in Urban Studies
The division of the world to First, Second, and Third Worlds fell apart when the Soviet Union crumbled in 1991. The previous Cold War studies on the Soviet Union and other socialist countries transformed into the field of research on postsocialism. While postsocialist urban studies were initially clearly designated as an empirically oriented regional studies field, this area has now become a vibrant area of debate on inbetweenness (between North and South) and urban transformations. While some scholars are calling for disbanding the notion of postsocialism altogether (Gentile 2018), others work to revise and remake it into something that could be utilized in various cases and contexts, also beyond the former Second World (Tuvikene 2016), also exploring ways to use postsocialism for countries such as China. We can identify three waves of studying postsocialism. The first one offers perspectives on the cities of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the former Soviet Union (FSU) as going through their own urban processes. Often these studies built parallels with the Western patterns and raised questions on the similarities with and differences from those approaches (summary in Sýkora 2009). Nevertheless, such research also brought forward perspectives taking the historical difference seriously and building “strategic essentialisms” from CEE/FSU. The second wave, appearing prominently in the much-cited paper Stenning and Hörschelmann 2008, as well as in Hirt 2013, Ferenčuhová 2016, and Sýkora and Bouzarovski 2012, forms critical accounts informed importantly by anthropology and other social sciences, and questioning historical differences and essentialization. In these accounts, the society is a hybrid of past and present and variously interlinked with worlds beyond the particular cities and societies under scrutiny in research. The third wave is explicitly linked to the comparative urbanism field and seeks ways to not only deconstruct regional divisions, but also to find productive ways of bringing postsocialism to the conceptual center of studying cities. Works such as Ferenčuhová and Gentile 2016, Gentile 2018, Grubbauer and Kusiak 2012, and Tuvikene 2016 show different ways for postsocialism to be a valuable notion and a field of study for urban research.
Ferenčuhová, Slavomíra. “Accounts from behind the Curtain: History and Geography in the Critical Analysis of Urban Theory.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 40.1 (2016): 113–131.
DOI: 10.1111/1468-2427.12332Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
The paper highlights the importance of historical work on knowledge production to understand the contemporary accounts of postsocialism in urban studies. The paper focuses on the East-West intellectual connections, drawing parallels between today’s and historical practices.
Find this resource:
Ferenčuhová, Slavomíra, and Michael Gentile, eds. Special Issue: Post-Socialist Cities and Urban Theory. Eurasian Geography and Economics 57.4–5 (2016).
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A special issue on rethinking cities of Eastern and Central Europe and formerly Soviet territories in the wake of recent trends within comparative urbanism. The papers in this issue question the usefulness of the notion of postsocialism, but also investigate the applicability of gentrification and creative cities for the studies of Eastern Europe, new theorizations of “zombie socialism,” and path dependencies.
Find this resource:
Gentile, Michael. “Three Metals and the ‘Post-Socialist City’: Reclaiming the Peripheries of Urban Knowledge.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 42.6 (2018): 1140–1151.
DOI: 10.1111/1468–2427.12552Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Gentile is a scholar whose career is devoted to working on the post-Soviet and post-socialist region. In this paper, however, he offers some skepticism toward the notion of “postsocialism” itself, drawing out its limits to really offer radical and productive alternatives for scholarship capable of moving out from the regional and temporal boundaries and talking to wider urban studies’ scholarship.
Find this resource:
Grubbauer, Monika, and Joanna Kusiak, eds. Chasing Warsaw: Socio-Material Dynamics of Urban Change since 1990. Frankfurt and New York: Campus Verlag, 2012.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Raising questions pertinent to urban theorizing from the point of view of Warsaw, this book is one of the most important elaborations on postsocialist cities from a comparative urbanism perspective. The edited collection builds on notions such as chaos and socio-material processes of urban infrastructures and consumption, as well as all sorts of smaller and larger physical elements.
Find this resource:
Hirt, Sonia. “Whatever Happened to the (Post)Socialist City?” Cities 32.S1 (2013): S29–S38.
DOI: 10.1016/j.cities.2013.04.010Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
An overview of socio-spatial realities of postsocialist cities, taking a hybrid and relational point of view. The paper draws out both changes and various continuities highlighting all sorts of legacies of Soviet and socialist past. While questioning whether such a notion as “postsocialist city” exists at all, the paper in different ways reifies its existence, but in a more hybrid, relational, and variegated way than often perceived.
Find this resource:
Stenning, Alison, and Kathrin Hörschelmann. “History, Geography and Difference in the Post-Socialist World: Or, Do We Still Need Post-Socialism?” Antipode 40.2 (2008): 312–335.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2008.00593.xSave Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
While not directly a paper on urban studies, this article sets out different elements of critical accounts to postsocialism beyond frameworks narrowly focusing on transition from one system to another or regional difference. It is a landmark article for anyone interested in understanding socio-spatial developments of postsocialist transformations.
Find this resource:
Sýkora, Ludek. “Post-Socialist Cities.” In International Encyclopedia of Human Geography. Vol. 8. Edited by N. J. Thrift and Rob Kitchin, 387–395. Oxford: Elsevier, 2009.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A summary of postsocialist cities by a leading scholar in the field. While not explicitly about comparative urbanism, the piece highlights different trends in the cities in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, making both the cities themselves and the scholarship on them stand out as interlinked and coherent.
Find this resource:
Sýkora, Luděk, and Stefan Bouzarovski. “Multiple Transformations: Conceptualising the Post-Communist Urban Transition.” Urban Studies 49.1 (2012): 43–60.
DOI: 10.1177/0042098010397402Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A widely read and cited paper that challenges the transition narrative of postsocialism by noting different entangled transformations. While pointing out the fast institutional changes, which are often seen as central in the transition narrative, the paper stresses the slower shifts in social practices and the slowest transformations of urban (physical) landscapes.
Find this resource:
Tuvikene, Tauri. “Strategies for Comparative Urbanism: Post-Socialism as a De-territorialized Concept.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 40.1 (2016): 132–146.
DOI: 10.1111/1468-2427.12333Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
In this paper, Tuvikene offers a critique of postsocialism as a spatiotemporal container and highlights limits of seeing it as merely a particular condition after 1989–1991 political shifts. Instead, the paper works toward a deterritorialized conceptualization of postsocialism, with the term postsocialism applicable to certain aspects (such as the constitution or housing estates) rather than cities and societies as totalities.
Find this resource:
Asian Urbanism
Comparative urbanism draws from postcolonial and subaltern studies, with roots in the critical accounts of the colonial present and aftermath. Many of the first proponents of comparative urbanism were scholars on Asian cities (Tim Bunnell, Colin McFarlane, Ananya Roy, and others), particularly on India, but also on other areas of South and East Asia. While megacities with millions of inhabitants should not need considerable advertising to be research-worthy, scholars have still done hard work to make arguments for putting these cities on the map. For Roy 2009 (cited under Comparative Urbanism through and beyond Informality), informality and poverty still remain dominant, if much limited, perspectives to think about Asian cities. Roy 2016 proposes that thinking from Asian cities challenges the Eurocentrism of urban studies: in her proposal to move away from regional-based divisions of the world, the question for Roy is “when” is Asia rather than “where” is Asia. Studies, then, in different ways seek to position Asian cities to urban theory. Bunnell, et al. 2012 does this by arguing for the actual centers of urban theory being in Asia. Ren and Luger 2015, meanwhile, takes a comparative urbanism perspective to focus on mobilities as connecting, Padawangi 2019 takes the vantage point of Asian cities for theorization, and Lin 2007 makes claims to particular subregional types of urbanism, such as Chinese urbanism. While some studies have criticized any focus on Asian cities due to the homogenizing forces of globalization (Dick and Rimmer 1998), others gain strength from the thesis of an “Asian century,” with Asian cities politically and economically moving to the center of the global city experience (Ong and Roy 2011). Yet others, such as Ren and Luger 2015, stress the incessant mobilities that complicate any simple regional demarcation or clustering. According to Ren and Luger, it is not simply the grand force of globalization, but also the various mobilities of policies, that bring all sorts of ideas into interaction with local cultural, economic, and political circumstances. One such policy, as Wang, et al. 2016 shows, is based on the idea of creative cities, which rather than simply being applied, becomes embedded in the cultural and political tensions of Asian societies.
Bunnell, Tim, Daniel P. S. Goh, Chee-Kien Lai, and C. P. Pow, eds. Special Issue: Global Urban Frontiers? Asian Cities in Theory, Practice and Imagination. Urban Studies 49.13 (2012).
DOI: 10.1177/0042098012452454Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A special issue that aims to challenge the inequality and disparity of urban theorization wherein the conceptualizations lack attention to the actual centers of the urban world. Such centers are increasingly shifting to Asia.
Find this resource:
Dick, H. W., and P. J. Rimmer. “Beyond the Third World City: The New Urban Geography of South-east Asia.” Urban Studies 35.12 (1998): 2303–2321.
DOI: 10.1080/0042098983890Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
The paper has become a landmark piece among earlier works questioning the regional differentiation of Southeast Asia. The paper argues that because of globalization, the narratives highlighting divergence from the Euro-American processes and affinities of the “Third World” won’t apply for Southeast Asia. There are instead grounds for talking in the same terms used for “First World” cities, due to similar trends of urban development.
Find this resource:
Lin, George C. S. “Chinese Urbanism in Question: State, Society, and the Reproduction of Urban Spaces.” Urban Geography 28.1 (2007): 7–29.
DOI: 10.2747/0272-3638.28.1.7Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Lin argues for a distinctive Chinese urbanism in the context of globalization. While the exact meanings of social organization and degree of freedom have varied from one state ideology to another, the principles of state and society relations have been consistent throughout the history of Chinese urbanism. That is, there are shifts in the degrees of freedom for market actors, but the system has been defined by a strong state and forceful collective throughout history.
Find this resource:
Ong, Aihwa, and Ananya Roy, eds. Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments in the Art of Being Global. Chicester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
The edited collection discusses the strategy of worlding cities, with an aim to break existing practices of city-making, moving from a smaller-scale view to global (world) ambition. Looking from the vantage point of Asian cities, the book highlights practices of comparisons between cities. The book draws attention to modeling, inter-referencing practices, and new solidarities transcending class and city divides.
Find this resource:
Padawangi, Rita, ed. Routledge Handbook of Urbanization in Southeast Asia. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2019.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
The handbook deals with rapid urbanization, but also questions of area studies vis-à-vis general theorizations of urbanization. Firmly rooted in its regional focus on Southeast Asia, the book also seeks to position such cities solidly in theory-making, looking for what they have contributed or can contribute to broader conceptualizations. Particularly of relevance for those interested in the intersection of Asian cities and comparative urbanism is the section of the book titled “Theorizing Urbanization in Southeast Asia.”
Find this resource:
Ren, Julie, and Jason Luger. “Comparative Urbanism and the ‘Asian City’: Implications for Research and Theory.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 39.1 (2015): 145–156.
DOI: 10.1111/1468-2427.12140Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Ren and Luger discuss the conceptual and methodological challenges entailed in studying Asian cities in a comparative urbanism framework. The paper notes the challenge of perpetuating some regionally distinctive clusters, as this may pose a danger of new forms of parochialism. The article argues for “Asian City” as an idea set in all sorts of connections through different sorts of mobilities.
Find this resource:
Roy, Ananya. “When Is Asia?” Professional Geographer 68.2 (2016): 313–321.
DOI: 10.1080/00330124.2015.1099183Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Roy suggests an alternative to the taken-for-granted regional analysis by repositioning the common framing of territorial locations that the notion of “Asia” entails, and instead suggests seeing Asia as a project—such as evoked in notions of an “Asian century”—located in a particular historical and political conjuncture.
Find this resource:
Wang, June, Tim Oakes, and Yang Yang, eds. Making Cultural Cities in Asia: Mobility, Assemblage, and the Politics of Aspirational Urbanism. New York: Routledge, 2016.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This edited collection deals with the case of policy mobility and the assemblage approach to incorporating and developing a policy of creative cities in various Asian cities. Written by renowned scholars on Asian cities, it offers a strong case for focusing on the local particularities of Asian cities in interaction with globally prominent and mobile ideas of creativity, using an assemblage approach to bring the different forces and developments together.
Find this resource:
African Cities in Comparative Urbanism
As many of the key proponents of comparative urbanism emerged from the urban studies of sub-Saharan Africa (e.g., Sue Parnell, Jennifer Robinson, AbdouMaliq Simone, and others), the literature built one way or another on the basis of their inspiration. Of course, this does not mean that they were merely regional scholars. Neither does it mean that sub-Saharan Africa has become the main site for rethinking urban studies. However, it does mean that the work of comparative urbanism importantly builds on the experience of what are called “African cities.” In much of contemporary theory and practice, African cities are still seen as places that do not function properly, that have failed and are in need of development. At the same time, the patterns and possibilities of those cities’ development is compared with those of Euro-American cities and their modernism, with the history and local development of African cities seen as insufficient. Scholars Like Simone have not simply been critical and skeptical of such theoretical focuses and bases for practical interventions, but have also revised the language and offered ways of perceiving cities as emergent, allowing African cities more conceptual freedom and strength (see, e.g., Simone 2004). There are thus various authors who work toward the theory-making from an African perspective: Parnell and Robinson 2012 reworks the notion of neoliberalism, Myers 2011 challenges perceptions of decay and hopelessness, and Myers 2018 suggests theorizing the North from the Southern perspective. While Pieterse 2017 highlights different modes of theorizing African cities, other studies, such as Parnell and Pieterse 2016, stress a mode of research where practitioners and researchers codetermine studies and urban interventions. Thus, the scholarship on African cities has not only highlighted theoretical work, but also the value of practical engagement with urban developments.
Myers, Garth. African Cities: Alternative Visions of Urban Theory and Practice. London and New York: Zed Books, 2011.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
The book offers a revision of how African cities are seen in existing studies as well as providing new lines of conceptualizing and theorizing cities from the African perspective. While skeptical of any grand narrative of “African” cities, such discourses should also not be left merely for journalistic accounts that often portray “Africa” as in decay and in a hopeless position. Hence the book looks the world of cities from the perspective of Dodoma, Lusaka, and other cities in Africa.
Find this resource:
Myers, Garth. “The Africa Problem of Global Urban Theory: Re-Conceptualising Planetary Urbanisation.” African Cities and the Development Conundrum 10 (October 2018): 231–253.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
The African problem—the still persistent lack of attention to cities on the African continent by various strands of urban scholarship—is challenged in this paper not by using regular urban studies’ concepts, but by borrowing from the conceptual apparatus emanating from Chinese cities. Thus, the paper advocates South-South comparisons to revitalize urban studies and provide ways out of the persistent Eurocentrism.
Find this resource:
Parnell, Susan, and Edgar Pieterse. “Translational Global Praxis: Rethinking Methods and Modes of African Urban Research.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 40.1 (2016): 236–246.
DOI: 10.1111/1468-2427.12278Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A larger global urban agenda means research where African cities also have a more prominent position than before. This paper highlights the translational mode of research, where the lack of data and stable institutional forms require closer engagement of researchers in urban practice and change. Perhaps more than is common elsewhere, African research entails codetermination together with NGO members, city administrators, and policymakers.
Find this resource:
Parnell, Susan, and Jennifer Robinson. “(Re)Theorizing Cities from the Global South: Looking Beyond Neoliberalism.” Urban Geography 33.4 (2012): 593–617.
DOI: 10.2747/0272-3638.33.4.593Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
The argument of the paper is that despite the ubiquitous use of neoliberalism and neoliberalization for understandings of cities, it is not a useful heuristic for many cities.
Find this resource:
Pieterse, Edgar. “The City in Sub-Saharan Africa.” In A Research Agenda for Cities. Edited by John Rennie Short, 218–232. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2017.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
The paper maps different routes of research on African cities. Building from Edgar Pieterse’s extensive previous work, the paper summarizes in accessible style different approaches to African cities and proposes to attend to four theoretical fields: southern urbanism, everyday urbanism, vitalist ontology, and ecological urbanism.
Find this resource:
Simone, AbdouMaliq. For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Cities are difficult to capture and emergent, aspects that Simone’s writings seek to capture using a novel style of narrating and explaining. The book provides close personal and ethnographic accounts of city life in Africa, with cities constantly made, repaired, and produced in contexts where much of the discussion centers on failures as well as the need for development. Simone skillfully weaves together insights from different African cities, and narrates these in often complex but innovative ways.
Find this resource:
Latin American Cities in Comparative Urbanism
While comparative urbanism deals with many regional constellations, it has remained relatively quiet on Latin American cities, at least in the English language literature. There have, nevertheless, been studies focusing on decolonization, dealing with similar concerns as comparative urbanism but often building more explicitly from indigenous geographies, and at the same time focusing on the power relations of knowledge-making (see Mignolo, 2005). Yet comparative urbanism and decolonial approaches equally value reorienting the center and periphery of urban studies’ theories. Most explicitly, Latin American comparative urbanist perspectives have dealt within gentrification debates (López-Morales, et al. 2016), structured around questions of whether class-led re-urbanizations could be discussed under the framework of gentrification. Thus, on the one hand, there is a scholarship offering a Latin American twist to existing conceptualizations, such as Janoschka, et al. 2014 and López-Morales, et al. 2016 on gentrification; Kanai 2014 on planetary urbanization (see also Schmid, et al. 2018, cited in Doing Comparative Urbanism: Methodological Advances); or Roy and AlSayyad 2004 (cited under Comparative Urbanism through and beyond Informality) on the workings of informality as shaped by Latin American urbanizations. On the other hand, some studies suggest launching new or revised concepts from the Latin American perspective. Schwarz and Streule 2016 and Schwarz and Streule 2020 offer an example of such work, as they discuss “territories” as having roots in the history of Latin America. Similarly, Goldfrank and Schrank 2009 develops understandings of ways of urban policymaking —municipal neoliberalism and municipal socialism—from the point of view of Latin American cities where extreme forms of neoliberalist and socialist policies on a national scale, but also importantly on urban scales, have found a basis. Of course, there is a wide range of studies in Spanish or Portuguese regarding Latin American urbanization, such as those by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Marcelo Lopes de Souza, or, particularly, an eminent critical geographer from Global South, Milton Santos (see Santos 1979 and Santos 2005), among many others. To conclude, while loud on critical decolonial claims, Latin America has less explicitly functioned in comparative urbanism, where Asian and African cities have formed a more prominent ground for thinking—this remains an omission hopefully to be rectified in the coming years.
Goldfrank, Benjamin, and Andrew Schrank. “Municipal Neoliberalism and Municipal Socialism: Urban Political Economy in Latin America.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 33.2 (2009): 443–462.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2427.2009.00834.xSave Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
The article offers Latin America as a ground for positioning the emergence of urban policy ideas at the center, whether they emerge from the left or from the right of the political spectrum. Curiously, cities have appeared much more at the forefront of policymaking than would be expected in the contexts where they have a reputation of being impotent and indolent.
Find this resource:
Janoschka, Michael, Jorge Sequera, and Luis Salinas. “Gentrification in Spain and Latin America—A Critical Dialogue.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38.4 (2014): 1234–1265.
DOI: 10.1111/1468-2427.12030Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Through reviews of existing studies, this paper provides critical accounts of gentrification from the Latin American point of view. The paper suggests that gentrification debates have developed in different ways in Latin America than, for instance, in Spain, where the connections and mutual scholarship with Anglophone studies are stronger than in Latin America.
Find this resource:
Kanai, Juan M. “On the Peripheries of Planetary Urbanization: Globalizing Manaus and its Expanding Impact.” Environment and Planning D: Society & Space 32.6 (2014): 1071–1087.
DOI: 10.1068/d13128pSave Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
The paper deals with peripheries in light of planetary urbanization theory. It offers a case in Latin America, but not necessarily discussing the territorial configuration itself: the article is about extensive urbanization, suggesting the existence and extension of urban phenomena and processes in rural settings. It discusses the production of a world-class Manaus, wherein the aim is to make a global city from a place in the middle of the planet’s largest rainforest.
Find this resource:
López-Morales, Ernesto, Hyun Bang Shin, and Loretta Lees, eds. Special Issue: Latin American Gentrifications. Urban Geography 37.8 (2016).
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Focusing on urban developments in Latin America, the special issue responds to a challenge of theorizing from the periphery posed by comparative urbanism. The collection investigates class-led re-urbanizations as frameworks to think of gentrification from the Latin American perspective.
Find this resource:
Mignolo, Walter D. The Idea of Latin America. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A critical decolonial account of the “invention” of Latin America. Approaching the nexus of coloniality/modernity, the book investigates how the idea of Latin America came about. While not focused on urban studies, the book functions as a pertinent introduction to understandings of regional inventions such as Latin America.
Find this resource:
Santos, Milton. The Shared Space: The Two Circuits of the Urban Economy in Underdeveloped Countries. Translated by Chris Gerry. London: Methuen, 1979.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A translation of L’Espace Partagé, published in 1975. Only one of the two books by Santos translated into English, it offers critical accounts of Western-centric conceptualizations of Third World cities. Critical of mathematical and developmentalist approaches reproducing inappropriate theories and leading to wrong conclusions if based on theories of Western realities, this study draws from the experience of Latin American but also on African urbanization, and it develops a theoretical framework based on a historical account attentive to different paths of development. Reprinted in 2018 (London: Routledge).
Find this resource:
Santos, Milton. A Urbanização Brasileira. São Paulo: Edusp, 2005.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
The book—unfortunately not translated into English—by a prominent scholar of Latin American geographies, lays out different aspects of Brazilian urbanization, including the extensive forms contemporary urbanization has taken, with “urban” variously entering into otherwise rural territories.
Find this resource:
Schwarz, Anke, and Monika Streule. “A Transposition of Territory: Decolonized Perspectives in Current Urban Research.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 40.5 (2016): 1000–1016.
DOI: 10.1111/1468-2427.12439Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Utilizing Latin American conceptualizations of territory for a location in Mexico, the article suggests a framework of socio-territorial analysis to travel beyond Latin America. The socio-territorial approach embedded in colonial and multiscalar power relations of Mexico becomes a useful framework, as it draws attention to different dimensions, a variety of subjects, and their strategies as they intersect with constructing spatial visions, physically and imaginarily bordering areas, and drawing attention to often collective actions of counter-claims.
Find this resource:
Schwarz, Anke, and Monika Streule. “Introduction to the Special Issue ‘Contested Urban Territories: Decolonized Perspectives.’” Geographica Helvetica 75.1 (2020): 11–18.
DOI: 10.5194/gh-75-11-2020Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Introduction to a special issue on rethinking territoriality from the perspective of Latin American urbanization. The issue moves beyond Anglophone state-centric approaches to territory and develops from Latin American scholarship an approach where territory is processual, “a site and stake of everyday social struggles,” and relational. The special issue attends to the social production of territory from an explicitly urban lens.
Find this resource:
Revised Conceptual Constellations
One of the biggest advances for urban studies from the field of comparative urbanism relies on its offer of new and reframed concepts, allowing different and revised narratives of cities. Thus, while neoliberalism and gentrification have a long-lasting scholarship based on cities of the Global North, such insights are revised from the point of view of comparative urbanism. The same applies for informality, but in this case the work often empirically centralizes the Global South, and the novelty and challenge offered by comparative urbanism is the reversal of the perspective; that is, the lessons of Global South are translated to the Global North. In this section, two sets of conceptualizations are discussed. On the one hand, the section delves into gentrification that has been subject to critiques for its Western—if not even London, New York, or Berlin—centrism. Comparative urbanism, however, offers revisions. On the other hand, the section delves into informality. While being a “Southern concept,” it has also raised critiques for its hard to define meaning as well as essentialism and romanticization of living practices. Hence, the scholarship of informality has provided new terms, which more precisely capture the phenomenon at hand while at the same time seeking possibilities of applying these framings outside the site of their invention.
Comparative Urbanism through and beyond Informality
Literatures of political science, development studies, and economics have often characterized cities of the Global South as containing various informalities, with informal settlements and informal labor the most common of these. Problematization of cities as overwhelmed by informal areas—often defined as slums—has also run through the scholarship of urban studies, leading sometimes to dystopian accounts of uncontrolled urban growth, as manifested evocatively by Mike Davis’s book Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006). However, with there being increasing concerns of seeing cities of the Global South as in decay, lacking institutional structures, and in need of “catching up,” various works have offered alternative conceptualizations of cities and informality. Roy 2005, Roy 2009, and Roy and AlSayyad 2004 position informality as a defining force of cities, while Hilbrandt, et al. 2017 and Hentschel 2015 (and various other works) investigate cities of the “West” through informality, claiming the phenomenon to be not restricted to Asia, Africa, or Latin America. Similar arguments are made in Bunnell and Harris 2012, a great introductory piece to the topic. Not every account of informality in the North, however, is necessarily in accordance with the aims and scope of comparative urbanism. If it is simply about informal activities such as street vending, it remains merely a descriptive account of informality from a comparative urbanism point of view, and not effective enough to theorize and conceptualize from novel perspectives. There are a few emerging studies that achieve the latter. Hentschel 2015, for instance, invents a new concept (“fabrication”) for the analysis of Berlin’s informality through the lens of the Global South. Similarly, Schindler 2014 takes the concept of subaltern urbanism developed by Ananya Roy to counter the peripheralization of cities, done through notions such as slums, and attends to the city of Flint, Michigan (USA). More recently, such a challenge of problematizing informality, engaging it with conceptualizations of state, and expanding the territorial scope of the framing beyond the Global South has been picked up by a special issue in IJURR (see Haid and Hilbrandt 2019). In the intervention section of the journal, the editors and other authors propose state-theoretical understandings of informality in the Global South as well as North.
Bunnell, Tim, and Andrew Harris. “Re-Viewing Informality: Perspectives from Urban Asia.” International Development Planning Review 34.4 (2012): 339–348.
DOI: 10.3828/idpr.2012.21Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
An introductory paper to a special issue on informality and cities. The article reviews and revises this literature from the point of view of comparative urbanism. The paper makes an argument for attending to informality learning through the experiences of urban Asia. Nevertheless, it does not claim there to be a specific type of “Asian” informality, but instead advocates for Asian cities to be grounds for inspiration and research insights applicable to cities around in the world.
Find this resource:
Haid, Christian G., and Hanna Hilbrandt. “Urban Informality and the State: Geographical Translations and Conceptual Alliances.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 43.3 (2019): 551–562.
DOI: 10.1111/1468-2427.12700Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
An introduction to a special issue in IJURR challenging the geopolitics of theory. The paper, hence, postcolonializes informality by arguing it to be embedded in state institutions. By taking such a perspective, informality should not be seen as a special condition, outside the state and thus also outside the formal organizations of Euro-American cities, as it is often seen. Instead, the paper shows the informalities of states and the formalities of otherwise informal activities, thus challenging North-South and informality-state binaries.
Find this resource:
Hentschel, Christine. “Postcolonializing Berlin and the Fabrication of the Urban.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 39.1 (2015): 79–91.
DOI: 10.1111/1468-2427.12193Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Hentschel conceptualizes the old working-class Berlin neighborhood Neokölln through a Southern lens. Seen first as a failing neighborhood, and then one that is gentrifying, the paper instead offers the notion of fabricating for its conceptualization. Attempting to avoid simply plugging informality from South to North, the invented notion of “urban fabricating” is inspired from informality, “people as infrastructure” (AbdouMaliq Simone), and “piracy” to capture the composing, assembling, inventing, and recycling of cities.
Find this resource:
Hilbrandt, Hanna, Susana Neves Alves, and Tauri Tuvikene. “Writing across Contexts: Urban Informality and the State in Tallinn, Bafatá and Berlin.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 41.6 (2017): 946–961.
DOI: 10.1111/1468-2427.12583Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Written in the practice of comparative urbanism, the paper works through three cities in different parts of the world, with an aim to find unifying and common narratives. Thus, informality forms the common thread. Nevertheless, the informality is not essentialized in this paper—it is not a clearly delineated “thing.” Instead, informality exists in the fragmentation, porosity, and emergence of the state.
Find this resource:
Roy, Ananya. “Urban Informality: Toward an Epistemology of Planning.” Journal of the American Planning Association 71.2 (2005): 147–158.
DOI: 10.1080/01944360508976689Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Offering critical voices on defining informality as a separate sector, the paper sees informality as a mode of urbanization and planning. Moreover, informality is, in Roy’s account, not antagonistic to the state but produced by the state itself. It is the state that can define what is informal and what is not, as well as what can persist and what has to perish. In this way, moreover, informality is made common and not seen simply as something characterizing the “Global South.”
Find this resource:
Roy, Ananya. “Why India Cannot Plan Its Cities: Informality, Insurgence and the Idiom of Urbanization.” Planning Theory 8. 1 (2009): 76–87.
DOI: 10.1177/1473095208099299Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
The paper problematizes current theorizations of informality from the Indian cities perspective and positions informality as the principal means—an idiom—for urbanization and urban planning. The paper proposes to see informality as not synonymous with poverty, but instead as often the mechanism of wealthy urbanites. Additionally, informality is a form of deregulation rather than merely the lack of regulation, and the state itself is informalized—with informality taking place from above.
Find this resource:
Roy, Ananya, and Nezar AlSayyad, eds. Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Written from the critical stance toward Euro-American domination of urban theory in the Chicago or LA school of thought, by a number of renowned contributors, the book investigates cities of the Global South through the lens of informality. The editors of the book push for conceptualizing informality as a mode of planning and spatial practices—informality is the way cities are produced.
Find this resource:
Schindler, Seth. “Understanding Urban Processes in Flint, Michigan: Approaching ‘Subaltern Urbanism’ Inductively.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38.3 (2014): 791–804.
DOI: 10.1111/1468-2427.12082Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
The paper takes Ananya Roy’s concept of “subaltern urbanism,” developed in sight of Asian cities, and looks Flint, Michigan (USA) through this perspective. The paper offers an exemplary account of a Northern American city as theorized from and beyond the scope of assumed peripherality and informality of Southern urbanism.
Find this resource:
The Gentrification Debate in Comparative Urbanism
Gentrification has, over decades, become a key process to think about cities. More recently, its use and meaning has become widely questioned. Ghertner 2015 and Lemanski 2014 raise doubts about assembling so many different processes into a single term. Nevertheless, following Lees 2012, a strand of literature studying gentrification from a comparative urbanism framework has developed, delving into cases of Latin America (López-Morales, et al. 2016) as well as postsocialism (Bernt 2016), and questioning gentrification from the point of view of countries such as South Africa (Lemanski 2014, Mosselson 2017) or India (Ghertner 2015, Harris 2008). Largely, the approaches can be divided into two. On the one hand, Lees, et al. 2016 and López-Morales, et al. 2016 are examples of approaches seeing gentrification in comparison. These studies see the framework of gentrification as generally useful and attend to the variegation of processes as well as different causes for such transformations. On the other hand, there are approaches taking comparativism beyond gentrification while still questioning and studying processes around the notion. Suggested by Harris 2008 and Mosselson 2017, among others, these studies seek alternative conceptual innovations by theorizing from the periphery. Ghertner 2015 thus offers a study of forgotten processes such as land property regimes. Lemanski 2014 suggests devising new and hybrid formulations for gentrification. Cartier 2017 is an example of special issues written from the perspective of gentrification. Nevertheless, much of the work that deals with topics otherwise associated with gentrification has also not been explicitly framed as linked to this notion: the studies instead just focus on residential mobilities, land processes, displacement, and governing practices. While potentially valuable for comparative urbanism, these studies are, however, not included here for the lack of an explicit interrogation with gentrification.
Bernt, Matthias. “How Post-Socialist Is Gentrification? Observations in East Berlin and Saint Petersburg.” Eurasian Geography and Economics 57.4–5 (2016): 565–587.
DOI: 10.1080/15387216.2016.1259079Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A key paper on critical accounts of gentrification as related to postsocialism, the paper attends to two different sites in the postsocialist realm: Prenzlauer Berg in East Berlin and the central city of Saint Petersburg in Russia. Bernt warns that disbanding gentrification altogether is throwing the baby out with the bath water, as gentrification is useful to spot comparatively processes in neighborhoods, and also draws to the sight limits to claims of a homogeneous form of socio-spatial transition.
Find this resource:
Cartier, Carolyn, ed. “Interventions Forum on Contextual Urban Theory and the ‘Appeal’ of Gentrification.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 41.3 (2017): 464–525.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A collection of papers scrutinizing gentrification from the point of view of Hong Kong, mainland China, and Singapore. Responding to critiques pointing out the lack of attention to gentrification in these places, the interventions question the applicability of theories in lieu of local characteristics. Instead of looking for missing gentrification, attention should be paid to existing analytical discourses and empirical contextual insights.
Find this resource:
Ghertner, D. Asher. “Why Gentrification Theory Fails in ‘Much of the World.’” City 19 (2015): 546–556.
DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2015.1051745Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Ghertner calls for not subsuming every urban transformation process under the topic of gentrification, and warns against disregarding different land tenures, including the lack of access to private property in much of the world. For Ghertner, the tenure diversity is a major contribution that non-Western contexts can provide to studies of urban agglomerations and spatial dynamics.
Find this resource:
Harris, Andrew. “From London to Mumbai and Back Again: Gentrification and Public Policy in Comparative Perspective.” Urban Studies 45.12 (2008): 2407–2428.
DOI: 10.1177/0042098008097100Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Writing comparatively across Mumbai and London, Harris avoids positioning Mumbai in the development path of Global Northern cities. He instead highlights the need to include cities in the Global South into a dialogue with literatures on gentrification and associated concerns of “social mix,” displacement, and state role. For instance, the paper stresses the possibilities of learning from community resistances to predatory forms of gentrification in Mumbai.
Find this resource:
Lees, Loretta. “The Geography of Gentrification: Thinking through Comparative Urbanism.” Progress in Human Geography 36.2 (2012): 155–171.
DOI: 10.1177/0309132511412998Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A prominent scholar of contemporary gentrification studies, Loretta Lees suggests looking at gentrification through the lens of comparative urbanism. She points out the lack of engagement between both of the fields despite the strong comparative currents in gentrification research. The paper calls for decolonializing gentrification as a concept and expanding the geographical scope of its theorization, as well as expanding the pool where the practices of gentrification’s contestation are drawn from.
Find this resource:
Lees, Loretta, Hyun Bang Shin, and Ernesto López-Morales. Planetary Gentrification. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2016.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
In this book, authors specializing on different global regions in their research on gentrification travel through the world and various urban as well as peri-urban sites, noting various urban transformations, which they essentially see as variegated forms of gentrification. They eventually defend the concept of gentrification against prominent critiques in comparative urbanism, but nevertheless argue for its contextualization in empirical studies.
Find this resource:
Lemanski, Charlotte. “Hybrid Gentrification in South Africa: Theorising across Southern and Northern Cities.” Urban Studies 51.14 (2014): 2943–2960.
DOI: 10.1177/0042098013515030Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
The paper develops theorizing across Southern and Northern cities by integrating conceptualization of gentrification with that of downward raiding. Both are about higher-income groups moving into lower-income neighborhoods, but with the latter—downward raiding—applied more for Southern cities. Paying attention to hybrid forms of property acquisition and using context-specific empirical trends, combining understandings of housing as both asset and welfare good, hybrid gentrification enables more encompassing and attentive analysis than gentrification.
Find this resource:
López-Morales, Ernesto, Hyun Bang Shin, and Loretta Lees, eds. Special Issue: Latin American Gentrifications. Urban Geography 37.8 (2016).
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
The special issue grew out of the urge to respond to a challenge of theorizing from the periphery posed by comparative urbanism. Resulting from a large workshop with several scholars working on gentrification in Latin America, the collection investigates class-led re-urbanizations that are rarely understood as gentrifications. In this way, it aims to advance gentrification scholarship by revising and revitalizing the notion and associated conceptualizations through a geographical constellation of Latin America.
Find this resource:
Mosselson, Aidan. “‘Joburg Has Its Own Momentum’: Towards a Vernacular Theorisation of Urban Change.” Urban Studies 54.5 (2017): 1280–1296.
DOI: 10.1177/0042098016634609Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Mosselson highlights the importance of local context over global processes. He foregrounds complexity and multiplicity of processes, escaping the pregiven categories through which cities are studied. Thus, apart from gentrification, other paths of development should be noted, such as the developmental ambitions of post-apartheid or the dynamics of inner cities. Using gentrification as a key term for analysis also hides other important aspects.
Find this resource:
Article
- Abortion, Geographies of
- Accessing and Visualizing Archived Weather and Climate Dat...
- Activity Space
- Actor Network Theory (ANT)
- Age, Geographies of
- Agent-based Modeling
- Agricultural Geography
- Agricultural Meteorology/Climatology
- Animal Geographies
- Anthropocene and Geography, The
- Anthropogenic Climate Change
- Applied Geography
- Arctic Climatology
- Arctic, The
- Art and Geography
- Assemblage
- Assessment in Geography Education
- Atmospheric Composition and Structure
- Automobility
- Aviation Meteorology
- Beer, Geography of
- Behavioral and Cognitive Geography
- Belonging
- Belt and Road Initiative
- Biodiversity Conservation
- Biodiversity Gradients
- Biogeography
- Biogeomorphology and Zoogeomorphology
- Biometric Technologies
- Biopedoturbation
- Body, Geographies of the
- Borders and Boundaries
- Brownfields
- Carbon Cycle
- Carceral Geographies
- Cartography
- Cartography, History of
- Chicago School
- Children and Childhood, Geographies of
- Citizenship
- Climate Literacy and Education
- Climatology
- Communication
- Community Mapping
- Commuting
- Comparative Urbanism
- Complexity
- Conservation Biogeography
- Consumption, Geographies of
- Crime Analysis, GIS and
- Crime, Geography of
- Critical GIS
- Cultural Ecology and Human Ecology
- Cultural Geography
- Cultural Landscape
- CyberGIS
- Cyberspace, Geography of
- Desertification
- Developing World
- Development, Regional
- Development Theory
- Disability, Geography of
- Disease, Geography of
- Drones, Geography of
- Drought
- Drugs, Geography of
- Economic Geography
- Economic Historical Geography
- Edge Cities and Urban Sprawl
- Education (K-12), Geography
- El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO)
- Elderly, Geography and the
- Electoral Geography
- Empire, Geography and
- Energy, Geographies of
- Energy, Renewable
- Energy Resources and Use
- Environment and Development
- Environmental Electronic Sensing Systems
- Environmental Justice
- Ethics, Geographers and
- Ethics, Geography and
- Ethnicity
- Ethnography
- Ethnonationalism
- Everyday Life, Geography and
- Extreme Heat
- Family, Geographies of the
- Feminist Geography
- Fieldwork
- Film, Geography and
- Finance, Geography of
- Financial Geographies of Debt and Crisis
- Fluvial Geomorphology
- Folk Culture and Geography
- Future, Geographies of the
- Gender and Geography
- Gentrification
- Geographic Information Science
- Geographic Methods: Archival Research
- Geographic Methods: Discourse Analysis
- Geographic Methods: Interviews
- Geographic Methods: Life Writing Analysis
- Geographic Methods: Visual Analysis
- Geographic Thought (US)
- Geographic Vulnerability to Climate Change
- Geographies of Affect
- Geographies of Diplomacy
- Geographies of Education
- Geographies of Resilience
- Geography and Class
- Geography, Gramsci and
- Geography, Legal
- Geography of Biofuels
- Geography of Food
- Geography of Hunger and Famine
- Geography of Industrialization
- Geography of Public Policy
- Geography of Resources
- Geopolitics
- Geopolitics, Energy and
- Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI)
- GIS and Computational Social Sciences
- GIS and Health
- GIS and Remote Sensing Applications in Geomorphology
- GIS applications in Human Geography
- GIS, Historical
- GIS, History of
- GIS, Space-Time
- Glacial and Periglacial Geomorphology
- Glaciers, Geography of
- Globalization
- Health Care, Geography of
- Historical Geography
- History, Environmental
- Homelessness
- Human Dynamics, GIScience of
- Human Geographies of Outer Space
- Human Trafficking
- Humanistic Geography
- Human-Landscape Interactions
- Humor, Geographies of
- Hurricanes
- Hydroclimatology and Climate Variability
- Hydrology
- Identity and Place
- Immigration and Immigrants
- Indigenous Peoples and the Global Indigenous Movement
- Informal Economy
- Innovation, Geography of
- Intelligence, Geographical
- Islands, Human Geography and
- Justice, Geography of
- Knowledge Economy: Spatial Approaches
- Knowledge, Geography of
- Labor, Geography of
- Land Use and Cover Change
- Land-Atmosphere Interactions
- Landscape Interpretation
- Literature, Geography and
- Location Theory
- Marine Biogeography
- Marine Conservation and Fisheries Management
- Media Geography
- Medical Geography
- Migration
- Migration, International Student
- Military Geography
- Moonsoons, Geography of
- Mountain Geography
- Mountain Meteorology
- Music, Sound, and Auditory Culture, Geographies of
- Nations and Nationalism
- Natural Hazards and Risk
- Nature-Society Theory
- Neogeography
- New Urbanism
- Nightlife
- Non-representational Theory
- Nutrition Transition, The
- Oceans
- Orientalism and Geography
- Participatory Action Research
- Peace, Geographies of
- Phenology and Climate
- Photographic and Video Methods in Geography
- Physical Geography
- Place
- Polar Geography
- Policy Mobilities
- Political Ecology
- Political Geography
- Political Geology
- Popular Culture, Geography and
- Population Geography
- Ports and Maritime Trade
- Postcolonialism
- Postmodernism and Poststructuralism
- Pragmatism, Geographies of
- Producer Services
- Psychogeography
- Public Participation GIS, Participatory GIS, and Participa...
- Qualitative GIS
- Qualitative Methods
- Quantitative Methods in Human Geography
- Questionnaires
- Race and Racism
- Refugees, Geography of
- Religion, Geographies of
- Retail Trade, Geography of
- Rural Geography
- Science and Technology Studies (STS) in Geography
- Sea-Level Research, Quaternary
- Segregation, Ethnic and Racial
- Service Industries, Geography of
- Settlement Geography
- Sexuality, Geography of
- Slope Processes
- Social Justice
- Soils, Diversity of
- Sonic Methods in Geography
- Spatial Analysis
- Spatial Autocorrelation
- Sports, Geography of
- Sustainability Science
- Sustainable Agriculture
- Synoptic Climatology
- Technological Change, Geography of
- Telecommunications
- Teleconnections, Atmospheric
- Terrestrial Snow, Measurement of
- Territory and Territoriality
- Terrorism, Geography of
- The Climate Security Nexus
- The Voluntary Sector and Geography
- Time, Geographies of
- Time Geography
- Time-Space Compression
- Tourism Geography
- Transnational Corporations
- Unoccupied Aircraft Systems
- Urban Geography
- Urban Heritage
- Urban Historical Geography
- Urban Meteorology and Climatology
- Urban Planning and Geography
- Urban Political Ecology
- Visualizations
- Vulnerability, Risk, and Hazards
- Vulnerability to Climate Change
- Water
- Weather and Climate Damage Studies
- Wetlands
- Whiteness, Geographies of
- Wine, Geography of
- World Cities
- Young People's Geography
