This paper presents ‘shared projects’ and the ‘symbiotic’ relations they engender to capture accounts of state and society actors collaborating to turn individual constraints into collective opportunities for pursuing urban experiments which are institutionally-shaped but also institution-shaping. The concepts are developed through a sequential and recursive comparison – that is, a ‘comparative conversation’– between a case of urban village upgrading in Shenzhen and Community Land Trust Development in London. The paper uses a pragmatist approach to capitalist transformation as a starting point for comparison between these supposedly ‘incomparable’ cases. I build both heterogeneous and generalisable accounts of the pathways and progressive potential of collaborations on shared projects by recursively composing analytical proximities across the cases and their contexts of state entrepreneurialism and austerity localism. Theoretically, this paper contributes to scholarship which focuses on the contingency and complexity inherent in urban transformation. State and society actors are seen as potential collaborators working pragmatically to solve systemic problems without necessarily targeting wholesale systemic change. Methodologically, it contributes to ongoing attempts to demonstrate the positive relationship between experimental comparisons and conceptual innovation through staging a ‘comparative conversation’.
Despite global academic interest, the field of urban China continues to be dominated by exceptionalist theorising. Given that the unique properties of Chinese urbanisation present rich cases for an engaged pluralism in urban studies, we argue for theorising with urban China based on two methodological grounds: ‘thinking cities through elsewhere’ and conjunctural analysis. This opens space for mid-level theorisation, which has the potential to contribute to the revision of existing theoretical frameworks and/or create new starting points for analysis and conceptualisation between urban China and a wider range of contexts. We propose three tactics for mid-level conceptualisation with urban China cases: generating concepts through bespoke comparisons between cases in urban China and elsewhere; conceptualising from a single urban China case by placing two theoretical frameworks into conversation; and launching concepts developed from inductive research in urban China to develop novel analytical frameworks. We conclude by arguing that theorising with urban China can benefit from collaborative research across borders, with the need to include researchers who are deeply embedded in the field.
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