ABSTRACT
Cities have always been understood comparatively. While comparison may appear as a prosaic set of methodological questions around case studies, in practice it is a critical part of how understanding, theory and research about cities are produced and contested. Recent years have witnessed not just a resurgence of comparison but a new experimentalism with comparative thinking and methodologies. This is in part a response to the globalisation of urban policy, planning, economies, cultures and ecologies, but it is also an attempt to internationalise urban geography and development by thinking across intellectual and imaginative divides that have traditionally separated out the cities of the Global North from those of the Global South. Our inherited conceptions of the city are often premised on the experiences and theoretical work based upon cities in Western Europe and North America, accompanied by the often implicit slippage between claims about certain cities (e.g., New York, Los Angeles, Barcelona, Berlin, Paris, or London) and claims about ‘the city’ as an abstract, generalised category. Part of the revival of comparison has been to widen the range of urbanisms that constitute urban theory.
