A posteriori comparisons, repeated instances and urban policy mobilities: What ‘best practices’ leave behind

This Introduction to the special issue, ‘ Comparative Methods for Global Urban Studies’, outlines the basis for a reformatted comparative method inspired by the complex spatialities of the urban world. The articles in the volume each bring forward innovative approaches to comparative methods which support wider conceptualisations of urban processes and urban experiences. The articles in this volume consider a wide range of urban contexts and collectively move beyond geopolitically imprecise propositions of ‘southern’ urbanism to embrace the wider comparative agenda of thinking with both the diversity and the profound interconnectedness of the urban globally. The articles contribute to decentring urban studies, opening conceptualisation to a range of different contexts and differently positioned writers. They also speak to the analytical and methodological challenges posed by current trends in global urbanisation, as dispersed, fragmented and extending over vast territories. Thinking with the multiple elsewheres of any urban context invites a comparative imagination – this introduction draws together the creative ways in which authors in this volume have responded to this potential. Processes of conceptualisation both emerge from and more acutely reveal the spatiality and nature of the global urban: comparative method, then, also proposes a certain mode of theorisation of the urban.

Section: The Shape Of the Urban: Grounds For Comparative Practicementioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction: Generating concepts of ‘the urban’ through comparative practice

Robinson

2022

“…Investigating the consequences of model city designations and the mobility of expertise, Sergio Montero and Gianpaolo Baiocchi present a posteriori comparison as a means to critically assess the residual impact of ‘best practice’ narratives on Bogotá and Porto Alegre (Montero and Baiocchi, 2021). The authors do not situate Bogotá and Porto Alegre as most similar cases simply because they are in Latin America; they first establish a theoretical case about global policy circulation and investigate the ways that urban success emphasises small-scale policy changes rather than the broad reforms necessary to make those changes possible (Montero and Baiocchi, 2021: 2–3). Doing so, they engage with Bogotá and Porto Alegre in a way that opens up these cities to being comparable with many cities also held up as international best practice references; Singapore comes to mind (Huat, 2011).…”

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confidence: 99%

A more global urban studies, besides empirical variation

Ren

2022

An expanded set of sites, a more differentiated set of references and linguistic diversification have been discussed as needed changes in urban studies. The critiques of the limitations of urban studies, in terms of both the scholarship and the scholars, offer important and concrete responses to expanding the scope of the field. Yet this tremendous special issue on ‘Comparative Methods for Global Urban Studies’ with 10 papers cutting across a range of sites and topics is decidedly not only about empirical variation; this is an important distinction worth drawing more attention to. The creativity expressed in these papers comes at an auspicious time in urban studies where new routes for doing urban theory are needed to move past debates about singular versus plural epistemologies of the urban. As a kind of research that demands more translation, exchange and collaboration, perhaps comparative urban research as a mode of theory-building can help to humble the chest-pounding, posturing, privilege of thinking and speaking the language of theory. The theoretical ambitions of these very different papers show how urban theory need not only be about better understanding urbanisation within the epistemological confines of late capitalism. Rather than reifying a shared grammar of urbanisation as a necessity to understand each other, they may entice scholars everywhere to develop a broader vocabulary and perhaps even learn another language.

“…Although all the papers push for theoretically-informed, empirically-rigorous analysis, some are more attentive to the spatialities of the urban, including circulations and connections (Kanai and Schindler, 2022; Kipfer, 2021), while others build new insights for thinking across different contexts (Robinson et al, 2022; Teo, 2021). And, though all the papers theorise comparisons of, in and by the Global South, some also draw on historical (Kipfer, 2021; Stanek, 2021) or a posteriori (Montero and Baiocchi, 2021) approaches. Three explicitly draw on the concept of tracing –Saraiva’s (2021) study of slum upgrading in Durban and São Paulo, Kanai and Schindler’s (2022) insights into infrastructure-led development in East Africa and South America and Montero and Baiocchi’s (2021) reflections on a posteriori comparison in Bogotá and Porto Alegre.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…And, though all the papers theorise comparisons of, in and by the Global South, some also draw on historical (Kipfer, 2021; Stanek, 2021) or a posteriori (Montero and Baiocchi, 2021) approaches. Three explicitly draw on the concept of tracing –Saraiva’s (2021) study of slum upgrading in Durban and São Paulo, Kanai and Schindler’s (2022) insights into infrastructure-led development in East Africa and South America and Montero and Baiocchi’s (2021) reflections on a posteriori comparison in Bogotá and Porto Alegre. These three papers, in addition to many others in the special issue, allow us to further explore the three definitions of tracing.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…This second definition highlights the role of actors in pursuing tactics of tracing. Several of the papers consider the policy actors working between the Global North and Global South (Niranjana, 2022; Teo, 2021) as well as across the Global South (Kanai and Schindler, 2022; Montero and Baiocchi, 2021; Saraiva, 2021). Saraiva (2021) for instance draws on experiences, reflections and observations of policy actors working within and between eThekwini and São Paulo; while Teo (2021) considers the ‘symbiotic collaborations’ between municipal officials and their professional collaborators in Shenzhen and London; and Kanai and Schindler (2022) focus on the policy networks spearheaded by the World Bank and the G20 that are fuelling infrastructural investment.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Tracing as comparative method

Wood

2022

Urban scholarship is bursting with comparison. We use comparison as an explicit and implicit tool to frame our urban analysis. But how do we actually do comparison? This commentary presents a fine-tuned analysis of ‘tracing’ as both a conceptual framework and a methodological process for doing comparative urbanism. It draws on the many excellent contributions in this special issue to argue for three methodological approaches to tracing – following the trace, the people doing the tracing and the pathways of tracing – adding reflections that are not only theoretically valuable but also practically useful. In concluding, I argue that this approach of tracing highlights the endless possibilities for thoughtful and productive comparison starting from everywhere and ending up anywhere.