Shared projects and symbiotic collaborations: Shenzhen and London in comparative conversation

Abstract

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’.

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

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

“…The clearest way in which the authors in this collection demonstrate their experimental nature is in how they do the comparison – thinking through the practicalities of data collection and analysis in a way that challenges existing understandings of how comparison can be done. In some papers this is comparison as a back and forth – the continual questioning that straddles two places (Niranjana, 2022; Teo, 2022). The back and forth was, by Niranjana’s own arguments, a trial-and-error approach.…”

“…Being experimental can (but does not have to) mean being open to change and adaptive to different circumstances as they arise in the course of the comparison. For Teo (2022) the experimental approach is about instigating and working with the unexpected. On a practical level, for those of us with intimate professional knowledge and extensive connections in one place, being open to changing strategy and being experimental in how we collect and analyse our data can enable us to navigate uneven levels of access across cases – which may or may not be apparent from the outset.…”

“…Comparative urbanism is canon. Yet the question of exactly how to do this comparative analysis – the exact ways of putting into practice this powerful tool within urban studies – has evaded much of this written intellectual discussion (Teo, 2022). Instead, the question of how has been debated at sessions at the American Association of Geographers (AAG) annual meetings, the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) annual conference and more recently in online workshops (for example Malmo Institute for Urbanism’s workshop on dislocating urbanism), as well as, of course, in conversations between supervisors and students, and colleagues.…”

Tracing as comparative method

“…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.…”