Comparative urbanism : tactics for global urban studies / Jennifer Robinson.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Table of Contents


Series Editors’ Preface Preface ix

Introduction 1

Part I Reformatting Comparison 23

1 Ways of Knowing the Global Urban 25

Uncertain Territories, ‘Strategic Essentialisms’: Regions, the Global South and beyond 27

The Disappearing City: Planetary Urbanisation and its Critics 35

Decolonial, Developmental, Emergent: Different Starting Points, or Incomparability? 41

Dimensions of a Comparative Urban Imagination 47

Conclusion 50

2 The Limits of Comparative Methodologies in Urban Studies 53

Some Analytical Limits to the ‘World’ of Cities: Beyond Incommensurability 54

Conventional Strategies for Comparison in Urban Studies 57

The Potential of Comparative Research 69

Conclusion 76

3 Comparative Urbanism in the Archives: Thinking with Variety, Thinking with Connections 79

Expanding the Comparative Gesture 80

Thinking with Variety 83

Stretching Comparisons: Thinking with Connections 91

Conclusion 104

4 Thinking Cities through Elsewhere: Reformatting Comparison 107

Thinking with Concrete Totalities 108

Singularities, Repeated Instances, Concepts 119

Genetic and Generative Grounds for Urban Comparisons 125

Conclusion: From Grounds to Tactics 128

Part II Genetic Comparisons 135

5 Connections 137

Connections as Urbanisation Processes 138

Connections Producing Repeated Instances 146

Every Case Matters 154

Conclusion 159

6 Relations 161

Wider Processes 164

Urban Neoliberalisation, Comparatively 171

Connected Contexts 186

More Spatialities of the Urban: Topologies, Partial Connections, Submarine Relations 191

Conclusion 195

Part III Generative Comparisons 199

7 Generating Concepts 201

The Conceptualising Subject: Institutions, Horizons, Grounds 204

A Life of Concepts: Ideal Types 217

Thinking the ‘Concrete’ 230

Negotiated Universals: Concepts ‘In-common’ 235

Conclusion 243

8 Composing Comparisons 247

Working with ‘Conjuncture’ 249

Conceptualising from Specificity 263

Thinking across Diversity 271

Conclusion 276

9 Conversations 279

Shifting Grounds: Comparison as Practice 280

Comparison as Conversations 284

Theoretical Reflections 292

Mobile Concepts, or ‘Arriving at’ Concepts 295

Conclusion 301

Part IV Thinking from the Urban as Distinctive 305

10 Territories 307

Thinking from Territories 308

Which Territorialisations? 312

Assembling Territories 320

Conclusion 325

11 Into the Territory, or, the Urban as Idea 329

Detachment 331

Suturing 336

Standstill 340

Ideas 346

Informality, as Idea 357

Conclusion 362

Conclusion: Starting Anywhere, Thinking with (Elsew)here 369

A Reformatted Urban Comparison 370

Conceptualisation 376

An Explosion of Urban Studies 383

References 387

Index 441

Available to OhioLINK libraries.

"Urban studies has gone global - in the range of cities it considers, the scope of its theoretical ambition, and the breadth of practical concerns which now frame urban research. New topics, new subjects of theorisation and new centres of analytical innovation shape the field. The last decade has seen a significant transformation in the terms of the analysis of urbanisation and of the territories thought of as urban across the world. Many more places and processes are being brought into analytical conversation. Nonetheless, there is a keen awareness of the challenges of constituting a global field of urban studies. Shifts in the dynamic sites of rapid global urbanisation to Asia and Africa, along with the great diversity of forms of urban settlement, and the increasingly world-wide impacts of urbanisation processes, have led many urbanists to propose a renewal, if not a fundamental transformation, in urban theory. Many acknowledge this as a moment to confront head on the impossible object of the city, whose boundaries are perhaps even more indistinct than ever. The traditional object of urban studies is arguably disappearing in the face of sprawling urban settlements and "planetary" urbanisation processes. Cities, centres and suburbs become useless residual concepts, which must be used with circumspection and care. The field is in search of new vocabularies to engage with the extraordinary explosion and variety of urban forms - not just sprawling or extended, regional or mega, scholars reach for terms such as galactic and planetary to invoke the physical expansion and world-wide impact of urbanisation. There is much to think about here, and this book will contribute to how we can re-build theorisations in engagement with these trends. In this light, a series of methodological and epistemological dilemmas face all urbanists and require creative and new responses. How can concepts be reviewed, renovated, overthrown or invented across diverse urban outcomes? How can urban theory work effectively with different cases, thinking with the diversity of the urban world? How can the complexity of the urban be addressed with concepts which are necessarily always reductionist? Concepts are inevitably confined by those who articulate them to always begin somewhere, to be spoken always in some particular voice - and yet concepts must grapple with the inexhaustibility of social and material worlds. And what happens when concepts run aground, unable to speak to distinctive urban worlds?"-- Provided by publisher.

Jennifer Robinson is Professor of Human Geography, University College London, UK. She is the author of Ordinary Cities, a seminal work which developed a postcolonial critique of urban studies. Her empirical research in South Africa examined the history of apartheid cities and the politics of post-apartheid city-visioning, while her comparative research has considered urban development politics in London, Shanghai and Johannesburg, and transnational circuits shaping African urbanisation.