TY - BOOK AU - Robinson,Jennifer TI - Comparative urbanism: tactics for global urban studies T2 - IJURR studies in urban and social change book series SN - 9781119697510 AV - HT109 .R54 2022 U1 - 307.76071 23/eng/20220224 PY - 2022/// CY - Hoboken, NJ PB - John Wiley & Sons, Inc. KW - Cities and towns KW - Study and teaching KW - Sociology, Urban KW - Urbanization KW - Electronic books N1 - 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 N2 - "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?"-- UR - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781119697589 ER -