Journal The Comparative City Knowlege Learning Urbanism

Volume 34.
4 December 2010 72542
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research

DOI:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2010.00917.x
The Comparative City:

Knowledge, Learning, Urbanism
COLIN MCFARLANE
Abstract
ijur_917
725..742
What might be the implications for urban studies if we take comparison not just as a
method, but as a mode of thought that informs how urban theory is constituted?
Comparative research is experiencing resurgence in urban studies, yet there has been
little effort to critically debate how comparison might take place, particularly in
reference to comparison across the global NorthSouth divide. Existing epistemologies
of comparative research have focused on the domains of practicalities, methodologies
and typologies. Notwithstanding the value of these debates, this article offers an
alternative framing of comparison that focuses attention on theory cultures, learning and
ethico-politics, drawing on postcolonial debates. This approach works with an expansive
conception of comparison that positions comparison as a strategy. The article concludes
by outlining three implications for urban research.
To distinguish the other cities qualities,

I must speak of a first city that remains implicit.
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (1997 [1972]: 78)
Introduction
Urbanism has always been conceived comparatively. Im referring here not just to
explicit forms of comparison comparing city A with city B, for instance but
implicit comparisons that to different extents constitute the claims we make about the
city. When we read a study of a particular city, we often find ourselves comparing the
arguments, claims and instances with other cities that we ourselves study or know of.
When we make a claim about the city, or about a particular form of urbanism, the claim
is implicitly and, crucially, inevitably to some extent a comparative claim, because
our claims and arguments are always set against other kinds of urban possibilities or
Thanks to Jonathan Anjaria, Tariq Jazeel, Matthew Kurtz, Jenny Robinson and Ananya Roy for very
helpful comments on an earlier version of this article. The arguments here were facilitated by feedback
at three events: a joint Durham and Open University workshop on Politics of Comparison; an Urban
Salon seminar at University College London; and a departmental seminar in geography at the School of
Environment and Development, University of Manchester. In particular, the article beneted from
thought provoking discussions at these events with Patrick Le Gals, Jennifer Robinson, Erik
Swyngedouw and Kevin Ward. Finally, feedback from three IJURR referees was very useful. I am, of
course, solely responsible for the arguments and conclusions.
2010 The Author. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell
Publishing Ltd. Published by Blackwell Publishing. 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St,
Malden, MA 02148, USA
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Colin McFarlane
imaginaries. And yet, we rarely acknowledge this in urban studies. In this article I
examine urban comparison both as an explicit methodology, and as an implicit mode of
thought that informs how we construct knowledge and theory of the urban. The purpose
of the article is to consider what might be gained from attempting to make our implicit
comparative moves more explicit.
In particular, I will argue that if we are interested in theorizing abstractions like the
city or the urban condition, then it is difficult to imagine how comparison can be
anything other than an inevitable and important site of consideration. Attending to our
implicit comparisons reveals some of the assumptions we make when we speak or write
of the city or urbanism. For example, our conceptions of the city are often premised on
the experiences and theoretical work based upon cities in Western Europe and North
America, and cities outside of the global North are thus often understood in relation to
those referent objects. This raises two issues. Firstly, claims about the nature of the city
as a category or formation are often made with cities in the North implicitly in mind.
This means that there is often an implicit, unnoticed slippage between claims about
certain cities (e.g. New York or London) and claims about the city as an abstract,
generalized category. Secondly, urban studies as a discipline has been surprisingly slow
to analyse how the experience of cities in the South might cause us to rethink urban
knowledge and urban theory.
If we are interested in a more international or postcolonial conception of the city
a conception that attempts to grapple with the multiplicity of different cities, and ways of
knowing the city, across the global NorthSouth divide then it seems to me inevitable
that we examine what our implicit objects of reference are when we write urbanisms, and
that we consider how we might bring other urban experiences, knowledges and theories
into a more horizontal comparative field. I am arguing then for an expansive reading of
comparison that allows us to develop a more postcolonial urbanism, broadly cast. The
article asks: what might be the implications for urban theory when we take comparison
not just as a method, but as a mode of thought that informs how urban theory is
constituted? This positions comparison, as Oscar Lewis (1961: 55) argued, as a generic
aspect of thought rather than simply a specific method, and as central to knowledge
production and learning (Warwick and Osherson, 1973). Comparison in this more
expansive sense involves thinking about comparison politically as a means for
situating and contesting existing claims in urban theory, expanding the range of debate,
and informing new perspectives.
The article, then, seeks to contribute to an emerging debate around the prospects of a
postcolonial urbanism. Jennifer Robinsons work, especially her (2006) Ordinary Cites:
Between Modernity and Development, has been at the heart of this effort in urban studies,
and the article seeks to pick up on her important contribution. As Robinson (ibid.: 2)
states at the start of that book, a postcolonial revisioning of how cities are understood
and their futures imagined is long overdue. She has persuasively argued for a
cosmopolitan approach to urban studies, central to which is a straightforward question
and imperative: How are theoretical approaches changed by considering different cities
and different contexts? (Robinson, 2002: 549).
Comparison, of course, has a difficult history, caught up as it is with the history of
metropolitan colonial ethnographic research in the social sciences (Connell, 2007). I
consider comparativism as a research method, but more importantly as a mode of thought
and as a strategy for international urban studies. Comparative thinking can be a strategy
firstly for revealing the assumptions, limits and distinctiveness of particular theoretical or
empirical claims, and secondly for formulating new lines of inquiry and more situated
accounts. As a strategy of critique and alterity, comparativism depends, in part, on a
continuous process of criticism and self-criticism. One route to conceiving comparison
in this sense and there are, of course, other possible conceptions across the
NorthSouth divide is to attend to questions of comparison-as-learning and, in particular,
to an ethico-politics of learning through different theory cultures. These questions have
been explored in particular ways in postcolonial and development studies (e.g. de Haan
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and Maxwell, 1998; Chakrabarty, 2002; Chambers, 2002; Robinson, 2002; 2006;
Ferguson, 2006; McFarlane, 2006a; 2006b; Stoler, 2006a; 2006b) debates of
significance, I will suggest, for comparative urban research. In the expansive reading of
comparison offered in this article, I argue for attention not just to different scholarly
knowledges on cities from social science across the world, but different activist and
public knowledges that are important for the production of a more global, more
democratic urban studies characterized by diverse urban epistemes and imaginaries.
The article will begin with a brief discussion of comparative research in urban studies
and will then consider comparison more broadly as a form of research practice and
thinking that plays a crucial role in the production of knowledge and theory. It identifies
three key epistemologies of comparative research in urban studies: practicalities,
methodologies, and typologies. These debates generally approach comparison as an
operational tool, and less as an object of investigation that may be more or less political.
The second part of the article outlines an alternative framing of comparison that argues
for attention to three domains: theory cultures, learning and ethico-politics. A note on
nomenclature: as the article will show, I do not find terms like global North and global
South helpful, but I am also mindful that retaining global South has its political merit,
and that categories such as these cannot be simply written away. I prefer, however, to
speak simply of cities and urbanism, rather than North and South.
Comparative research and urban studies:

an impoverished inheritance?
There is a long history of explicitly comparative work in urban studies. Indeed, it may be
that urban studies, as one colleague recently suggested in a seminar discussion, is a field
that is driven towards comparative thinking a field littered, as Teresa Caldeira (2000)
has put it, with visible and invisible comparisons. There is certainly a tendency in strands
of urban planning to seek out models and apply them in different contexts, from the
Chicago School models to Corbusiers circulating modernist urbanisms that found
influence globally (Brazil, India, etc.), to the contemporary circulation of what Eugene
McCann (forthcoming) has called urban policy mobilities, from security and drug
policies to Business Improvement Districts and urban revanchism (see Ward, 2006;
2007; Swanson, 2007).
Comparative urban studies emerged as a focus of attention particularly from the late
1960s (e.g. Pahl, 1968; Meadows and Mizruchi, 1969; Tilly, 1974, as well as a host of
comparative journals, including Comparative Urban Research). Much of this research
either compared cities as distinct units or their urban national contexts with the aim of
explaining similarities or differences between them. This included an engagement by
urban anthropologists with the work of the Chicago School, which argued, for example,
that the formation of central urban areas is not a universally similar process, but a varied
and complicated set of histories (Robinson, 2006).
For Walton and Masotti (1976: 2), what they saw as the parochial and ethnocentric
nature of urban studies meant that this kind of comparison was long overdue. They
distinguished between two forms of parochialism in urban studies in the United States.
The first reflected a widespread belief that the explanation of local urban phenomena had
to be unique, and that comparative research was therefore of no value. The second, more
worrisome for them and in contradiction to the first tendency, appeared when
researchers venture into foreign settings with a prefabricated set of theories and
methodological tools which presuppose the order and meaning of events (ibid.: 2).
Seeking an alternative to these contrasting particularist and generalizing tendencies, they
sought a dialogue between scholars and debates in different parts of the world. They drew
on the example of urban ecology, a popular area of research at the time in the US, arguing
that if in North American urban ecology is shaped by the market, which determines
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Colin McFarlane
patterns of land use and social structure, in Third World cities urban ecology reflects
more the consequences of colonialism and the dominance of postcolonial elites. They
assert: The myopia of parochialism will be overcome to the extent that critical
comparative work can demonstrate that our present knowledge is inadequate to explain
urban forms and processes because it has either precluded examination of fundamental
causal forces by focussing on special cases, or because it has misinterpreted those causal
forces (ibid.: 3). While their edited collection includes examples from across the world,
the general tendency in comparative urban research has been to compare urban spaces
within or between Western Europe and North America, or key global cities like London,
New York and Tokyo (Sassen, 2002; Kantor and Savitch, 2005).
Writing about this period of comparative urbanism, Robinson (2006: 5) has argued
that contemporary urban studies leaps across this period of scholarship as if it were a
barren canyon of intellectual endeavour, tending instead to focus on categories of
success (such as global cities) and categories of decline and despair (such as poor and
dysfunctional mega-cities). We have been left with a rather impoverished notion of
comparison within urban studies. For me, there are three key reasons for this.
Firstly, urban studies remains like many other fields in the social sciences
caught up with an unfortunate history of categorization and developmentalism. As
Robinson has argued, comparative urban studies was shipwrecked on the reef of
developmentalism, which discursively constructed cities as developed, developing
and underdeveloped, or First and Third World (ibid.: 8). From the 1970s, urban
studies became increasingly divided by the hierarchical categorization of different
kinds of cities as developed or undeveloped . . . This divide continues to form the basis
for urban studies to this day, in which different kinds of cities are broadly thought to
be incommensurable (ibid.: 41). It is worth remembering that this division between
urban North=theory and urban South=development is not a straightforwardly
intellectual choice it is not the case that urbanists have had much written debate on
this division. It is instead an historical epistemic and institutional division that reflects
long histories of global geographical categorization that emerges through European
colonialism and becomes entrenched in the FirstSecondThird World categorizations
of the Cold War (for a discussion on this, see McFarlane, 2006b). Despite the fact that
many urbanists do not themselves subscribe to these categories, and despite efforts to
blur notions of First/Third, Developed/Developing, or North/South, these categories
have an ongoing performative effect they are stubborn, and are not easily written
away.
Secondly, there is a tendency in urban studies to attempt to compare with and learn
from the usual suspects. Despite the fact urbanists are acutely aware of the importance
of the particularities of place and history, which means that learning is always an indirect
process, there is nonetheless a tendency to attempt to compare or learn from places that
are deemed to be in some way similar. This rather instrumental notion of learning
through comparison as direct means that urbanists are drawn to places which appear
similar. This reduces comparison to an exercise in looking for similarities or directly
applicable explanations, and reproduces the usual urban suspects (especially LA,
New York, London, Paris and Barcelona). The net result of this tendency is that
comparison always a relation of similarity and difference is conducted less on the
basis of differences and more on the basis of similarities (Kantor and Savitch, 2005).
Pickvance and Preteceille (1991) locate comparison as the effort to seek out similarities
by comparing perceived similar societies that may have similar causes. Whilst attempting
to learn from the usual suspects does not necessarily diminish the quality and strength
of conclusions, it does necessarily negate a range of experience across the globe that
could prove useful. It precludes the possibility of learning from a variety of different
sites; as Robinson (2006: 62) has asked, Must we wait for social or spatial phenomena
to become the same before we can learn from experiences in different kinds of places?.
One way around this is to focus on comparison as a means of learning through
differences, rather than seeking out similarities.
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Thirdly, and following this, urban studies has inherited an impoverished sense of
comparison partly because of the influence of debates around paradigmatic urbanism.
These debates featured throughout the 1980s and 1990s in urban studies, and while there
is a sense that their moment has passed, they have left us with a rather parochial notion
of comparison. The debate around paradigmatic urbanism is, of course, most readily
identified with the LA Schools explicitly comparative claim that Los Angeles
represented the epitomizing world city (Soja, 1989a: 223), a paradigmatic city, or the
archetype of an emergent postmodern urbanism (Dear, 2000: 99). LA became a city
often depicted as, in Keils (1998: xiv) critical discussion, the archetypal twentieth
century form (see Curry and Kenney, 1999; Gottdiener et al., 1999; Dear, 2002 on
Las Vegas; Nijman, 2000 on Miami; Scott and Soja, 1996; Scott, 1999; Storper,
1999). For Beauregard (2003), such rhetoric of superlatives constitutes an academic
boosterism that blurs the links between urban theory and publicity and which is
ultimately at odds with critical theory (although see Brenner, 2003; Dear, 2003 on
unpacking prototypical, stereotypical and archetypical superlative formulations). This
rhetorical move marginalizes the possibilities of comparative work: By holding one city
up as a model, by suggesting a universal narrative, comparative analysis is reduced to a
perfunctory and unenlightening assessment of how the others compare to the
paradigmatic city (Beauregard, 2003: 190).
Dear (2003: 204), writing in response to Beauregard, disagreed, arguing that
comparative urbanism requires that world cities, mega-cities, ordinary cities, can
cities of the developing world be axiomatically incorporated into our analytical
purview. This claim, however, underestimates the power relations and methodological
slides that structure the production of urban theory globally. In particular, it negates the
more implicit tendency in urban studies whereby accounts of urban economy, politics,
public space or infrastructure slip from the experience of a clutch of Western cities to
claims about the city more generally as Amin and Graham (1997: 416) put it, the
methodological dangers of overgeneralizing from one or a few examples and the
danger of overemphasizing particular spaces, senses of time, and partial
representations within the city. As sociologist Raewyn Connell (2007: 64) has argued,
some strands of literature on cities and globalization such as Sassens (2002)
Global Networks, Linked Cities, which focuses on cities such as So Paulo, Shanghai
and Mexico are characterized by methodological projection: Data from the
periphery are framed by concepts, debates and research strategies from the metropole.
Moreover: There is no reference to the social thought of the periphery (ibid,
emphasis in original).
Taken together, these three tendencies have left us with a weak conception of urban
comparison. This is not to say, of course, that the comparative impetus has been lost in
urban studies. We can point to a range of recent examples and this is by no means
exhaustive including research:
comparing one city with several, including Amelang (2007) on Barcelona, and
Nijman (2007b) on Miami;
comparing two cities, including Huchzermeyer (2007) on the production of informal
settlements in So Paulo and Cape Town, and Oliveira (1996) on the role of race and
class in ghetto and favela formation in New York and Rio de Janeiro;
exploring how specific processes or features recur or diverge in different cities,
including Dick and Rimmer (1998) on the blurring of First World / Third World
city through new and changing patterns of wealth and poverty, connection and
disconnection, Gugler (2004) on world cities in the South, King (2004) on
architecture, design and culture, Roy (2003; 2005) on planning and citizenship across
North and South, and Smith (2002) on gentrification as a global urban strategy;
and research outlining a typology or exploring frameworks for comparative
urban research, including Brenner (2001); Robinson (2006); Nijman (2007a); Ward
(2008).
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We may, indeed, be witnessing the beginning of an upsurge in comparative urban

research that is global in its scope. My approach differs from some recent attempts in
urban studies to compare the city beyond the West, such as Guglers (2004) edited
World Cities Beyond the West: Globalization, Development and Inequality. This text
seeks to trace the emergence and nature of world cities amongst poor countries, and
progresses from a hierarchical range of cities as core and second-tier cities, with the
book aimed at second-tier cities. The book builds on world city literature by considering
not just the economic, but also the political and cultural dimensions of world cityness.
However, its strengths notwithstanding, the introduction remains focussed on a
narrow range of particular valuations of world cityness: their role as command functions
and key locations for finance and specialized services for firms; the location of
international firms (very few of the cities had headquarters of the worlds largest 100
corporations, but many of them have first-level subsidiaries); whether or not they contain
their home countrys stock markets (most featured in the book do). Of course, world city
theorists are not attempting to understand cities per se, but the nature and extent of
international connections between cities. However, the book reproduces a centrally
problematic tendency in world city / global city literature in that it values certain global
forms of economy while marginalizing other economies that are often more important (in
terms of city economies and everyday livelihood), especially the informal sector (e.g.
Simone, 2004).
I caution against this kind of integrationist approach, and instead use comparison both
to critically reflect on existing knowledge and theory, and to develop accounts of the city
that broaden the discursive field. At stake here is not simply the question of content, but
an ongoing critical reflection on the structures through which knowledge of the urban is
produced. Thinking comparison as a tool for creating new conversations and
collaborations, for reading different traditions and connections, and for expanding the
field of critique and inquiry, requires engaging comparison in its broadest form and
context, amongst a range of issues from cultures of knowledge production to learning
and ethico-politics. To begin developing this argument, I will next consider how
comparison as a research practice is conventionally approached within urban studies.
Epistemologies of urban comparativism

Comparison is often distinguished empirically and theoretically (Osborne, 2005).
Empirically, debates around urban comparison explore comparison as explicit method,
and generally focus on three domains: practical, methodological and typological.
Together, these three domains look to build frameworks or models for how to conceive,
conduct, and classify comparison as a form of research, and generally position
comparison as technical (i.e. apolitical). The domain of practicalities points to the
multiple physical difficulties of conducting comparative research, including questions of
training, language, resource, and time. The validity of comparative analysis across
contexts can be affected by a variety of factors, including whether unknown variables
from one context influence the study; whether the generality of underlying causes
is known; or whether language barriers preclude understanding beyond surface
appearances.
In debates on comparative methodology, there are two key interrelated areas of
concern that often emerge: the case study, and scope and identification. Comparative
research is driven by research objectives and deployed for a variety of reasons: in order
to fill a gap in understanding; to reveal the distinctiveness of a case; to place a case in a
broader context; or to reveal the generality or particularity of a process or theme.
Methodologically, these questions point most obviously to the role of the case study in
comparative research (see special issue of Boundary 2, 2007, on the case study). There
is no general rule to dictate the ideal number of cases for comparison (e.g., whether two
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or three, or two sets of two). Indeed, in some instances, one case study may by the ideal
number for comparative research because it can arguably provide more coverage than
a comparison focused on two or more sites. This latter approach to the case study
involves pursuing a travelling research imagination, seeking out other instances of a
given urban phenomena and trying to understand it in relation to different instances (see
Walton, 1982: 34 on the comparative imagination, cited in Ward, 2008: 3). Explanation
through comparison, then, is often conducted in one of two ways, whether through the
case study(ies) (Le Gals, 2002), or between the case study(ies) and more general
literature (Amelang, 2007). It is always possible, of course, that the individuality or
specificity of a singular case can be either lost in the multiplicity of cases, or its
significance overstated.
Secondly, scope and identification: Nijman (2007a) has raised four key challenges for
comparative methodology in urban research. Firstly, how to define the spatial
identification of the city itself and of the wider (urban, economic, political) system of
which it forms part? In more general terms: how do we identify the spatial unit to be
compared? As Ward (2008: 3) argues, urban comparativism must grapple with urbanism
not as discrete or self-enclosed, but as open and relational, embedded in networks and
flows. Secondly, the more specific problem of the role of the state and citystate
relations: to what extent and in what manner must cities be understood in reference to
their states? Put differently, what contextual factors matter most? Thirdly, what is the
relationship between globalization and the urban and what are the ramifications of
globalization for urban processes, urban networks, and urban categories? Again, cast
more generally, this question can be framed as: how does comparison address localglobal dialectics, and how can the scope of comparison be delineated? Finally, what are
we to make of the so-called urban convergence hypothesis that is invoked in
globalization debates? This raises the issue of temporality in comparative studies, and in
this specific case the difficulty of understanding the spatial expressions of globalization
in historical context (e.g. Alsayyad and Roy, 2006; McFarlane, 2008). Janet AbuLughods (1991) comparative work on cities is a strong example here. She has argued
that urban dynamics can only be understood in the context of historical analysis with a
long-term perspective. She has progressed by, first, understanding the long historical
trajectories in cities, and, second, comparing how these trajectories differ and building
insight from that basis.
A third key epistemic domain is that of typologies. Urbanists have explored a range of
broad typologies of urban comparative thinking and research (e.g. Abu-Lughods, 1976
discussion of legitimate and illegitimate experimental comparisons; Pickvance and
Preteceille, 1991). For example, Neil Brenner (2001) has adapted Charles Tillys (1984)
comparative typology in historical sociology for urban studies, identifying encompassing
comparison, individualizing comparison, universalizing comparison, and variationfinding comparison. Brenner (2001) sites examples of each form in world cities research.
Encompassing comparisons explain how local tendencies relate to the changing
structural positions within a system as a whole, and include Friedmanns (1986) world
city hypothesis or Sassens (1991) global city thesis. Individualizing comparisons
contrast specific instances of a phenomenon to grasp the peculiarities of a particular case,
and include Sojas (1989a, 1989b) work on Los Angeles or Kings (1991) work on
London. Universalizing comparisons seek to explain commonalities across contexts, and
here Brenner highlights Soja (1992) again this time comparing LA and Amsterdam, and
Fainstein (1994). Finally, variation-finding comparisons seek to explain differences
across contexts, and Abu-Lughod (1991) is an example.
These different forms of comparison are not mutually exclusive, and different
strategies can be used for different purposes. At stake methodologically in this typology
broadly cast is the play between, firstly, the general and the particular most
fully expressed in the tension between universalist-seeking and variation-finding
comparison and, secondly, between breadth and depth. Nijmans (2007a: 4) multipleoriented comparative approach usefully helps address these challenges: This approach
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Colin McFarlane
seeks to better understand a particular case through individual comparisons with other
(multiple) selected cases. Such comparisons go beyond ideographic description
and suggest theoretical argument, yet they can provide an important check on
universalism they are positioned to highlight, then, both idiosyncrasies and analogies.
There are multiple other ways of conceiving and conducting comparative research that
reflect different objectives and research methodologies (from ethnography to archive,
media and literature analysis). None of these necessarily mean that comparison leads to
a more informed or global knowledge. Comparison can create a singular object
whether as an exemplary case or set of cases, or as a process that rather than being
more representative or international, could well be more parochial. This is particularly
the case with integrationist forms of comparison, where sites, people and processes are
integrated into pre-given positions with limited openness on the part of the researcher to
learning from different contexts.
Notwithstanding the merit of the epistemologies of practicalitiesmethodologies
typologies, there are two important gaps in these discussions. Firstly, comparison is
discussed as an operational tool rather than as a key site for the urban imagination
a potential site of politics. Secondly, at stake in debates on comparison is not simply a
question of content. Comparison is structured by global categories like North and South,
habitual practices that centralize the usual suspects, and institutional practices of
knowledge production about cities (of which more later). If comparison is to rethink
urban knowledge and theory, then one useful framing for thinking postcolonial urbanism
is to attend to the epistemic and institutional lenses that frame comparison. In what
follows, I outline an alternative epistemology of comparison that seeks to be open to
multiple ways of conceiving the urban across a NorthSouth divide, and that in doing so
seeks to make a provisional response to the challenge of a postcolonial urbanism.
Rethinking comparison
This more expansive reading of comparison begins by questioning the assumptions
through which an object of urban comparison is arrived at, and reflecting on what the
norm or standard is assumed to be. Drawing on postcolonial and development
scholarship, I will outline three closely interrelated sets of concern here: theory culture,
learning, and ethico-politics. My aim in examining these three areas is to conceive and
deploy comparison as a strategy for destabilizing the assumptions and limits of
knowledge, ideas or theory and reveal its distinctiveness, and for formulating new
positions and lines of inquiry. Through reflecting on these three interrelated areas, the
epistemologies of comparative research outlined above methodology, practicality and
typology are to some extent reconsidered through new questions, including: who
decides on the nature, object and typologies of comparison and how is that decisionmaking system arrived at? How do different theory cultures produce typologies of
comparison, and should / could they be interrelated? What sorts of practical and
methodological tools and challenges are suggested through different theory cultures? My
attempt here is to offer one route through which, in Wards (2008: 4) phrasing, a
relational comparative approach might be pursued.
Theory culture
At a general level, comparison takes place not just across different sites, issues or
processes, but through and in relation to historical cultures of knowledge production.
Theory culture, following Mufti (2005: 475), is the habitus that regulates theory as a
discrete set of practices within and sometimes between specialisms and regions. These
cultures are relational, not bounded or territorial, and are often shot through with
disagreement and differences. Comparative research across theory cultures prompts
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reflection not just on contrasting spaces or processes, but on the ontological and
epistemological framings that inform how the world is being debated, how knowledge is
being produced and questioned, and about the purpose of knowledge, research and
theory. This means also considering the role of a whole range of institutional actors, from
journals to forms and patterns of citation to modes of writing and dissemination that
co-constitute theory cultures. By exploring how different theory cultures debate, for
example, the city, politics, infrastructure, modernity or globalization, or whether these
objects are even conceived of as such, there is potential to go beyond simply emphsizing
diversity or heterogeneity, to developing more situated understandings through
comparison. Importantly, I am not suggesting here that theory cultures are discrete or
enclosed traditions; rather, they are relational networks of interests, approaches and
methods that cut across different parts of the globe.
One challenge for urban researchers, as Patricia Yaeger (2007) has argued in relation
to a metropoetics of urban fiction, is to locate new epistemic groundings for thinking
about cities. She writes, we must go beyond the usual suspects: theorists like Georg
Simmel, Walter Benjamin, or even Henri Lefebvre, who have taught us so much about
European and American alienation, crowding, flanerie, and absolute space, and points
towards scholars like Achille Mbembe (2004) and his work on superfluity, the wealth
created through dispensable workers working in Johannesburgs mines (Yaeger, 2007:
12). This raises important questions about how learning through comparison across
different theory cultures might be conceived and conducted.
Learning
Robinson (2006: 7) argues for urban comparison as a basis for creative learning. She
demonstrates this by bringing the Chicago School and the Manchester School of African
studies into dialogue, showing how new questions can be inspired by juxtaposing two
schools. Comparison necessarily involves learning between different sites and
processes, but how might learning be conceived in relation to comparison? One route
might be to conceive of learning as indirect (McFarlane, 2006b). This conception of
learning stems from the general post-rationalist conception that learning must be
conceived not as a linear, instrumental process of transferring static blocks of
information or knowledge, but as a complex process that is at once social, relational,
material and contestable (McFarlane, 2006c). Given the role of the particularities of
place and history for comparison as a mode of learning, urban lessons can rarely be
transferred directly. For instance, specific urban development strategies in the South, like
public works, food policy or participation, may appear to offer little opportunity for
learning in the North if the approach is to ask whether the strategies can be transferred
directly. They may offer more, however, if the approach is to engage in debate around
these strategies without a rigid predetermined notion of whether and how they may be
useful. We can proliferate the examples: theorizing the city or urban change,
conceptualizing infrastructure or the urban economy, theorizing what constitutes the
urban political and so on.
How, then, might indirect learning actually take place? In what senses might we
think of this kind of learning? We could usefully point here to the notion of translation
in order to highlight the necessity and creative possibility of adaptation in learning.
Translation can place greater emphasis on the potential value of indirect learning,
drawing emphasis away from a focus on simply whether knowledge or an idea can be
transferred directly or not. While it is familiar to postcolonial studies (e.g. see Gupta,
1998 on mistranslation), the concept has interesting use in science studies that is
useful for conceiving indirect learning. Bruno Latour (1999: 179), for example, uses
translation to refer to displacement, drift, invention, mediation, the creation of a link
that did not exist before and that to some degree modifies the original two. A chain
of translation refers to the many steps through which knowledge is produced (ibid.:
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Colin McFarlane
311). Rather than focussing simply on the question of whether knowledge remains the
same or not, translation focuses attention on the multiple forms and effects of
knowledge.
The use of translation in science studies works through a set of arguments around
the constitution of agency and sociomaterial change, but what it draws attention to for
our purposes is the creative interaction between the here and there, and the
particular and the general, and is open to the possibility of varying degrees of stability
and flux: it is not the case that every encounter must always involve complete change,
nor is it the case that every encounter must always involve the recreation of a
periphery in the image of a centre (Amin, 2002; Allen, 2003). Translation, then,
embodies a sense of creative possibility that does not reduce learning to direct transfer.
In this context, translation echoes Saids (1984) development of travelling theory.
Said argued against the tendency to seek to apply theories wholesale or to dismiss
them as completely irrelevant. He argued instead that critics should judge
misreadings as part of a historical transfer of ideas and theories from one setting to
another (ibid.: 237).
This notion of misreading focuses attention on the importance of change and the
possibility of using what is witnessed, experienced or read about in one place in a way
that need not be about trying to copy and directly apply it in another. The concept
addresses a politics of replication that has an increasingly powerful force in
contemporary urban policy debates for instance, in the circulation of urban policy
knowledges, or neoliberal, revanchist and punitive ideologies (e.g. see Peck and
Theodore, 2001; Peck, 2003; Ward, 2006; 2007; Swanson, 2007; Wacquant, 2008;
McCann, forthcoming), maintained through a variety of city-wide and more mundane
changes. As McCann (2008: 6) has argued in relation to urban consultancy experts that
constitute global spaces of emulation and regimes of urban truths: Comparison and
learning produce and bolster particular forms of representation and apparently mundane
practices, such as fact-finding trips.
However, as Mbembe (2004: 375) has argued in relation to Johannesburg, this
temptation of mimicry the desire to copy, to learn directly from another urban
experience can itself lead to mimesis, i.e. the capacity to establish similarities with
something else while at the same time inventing something original (ibid.: 376). This
capacity to mime is common to cities, and names a process through which cities
learn indirectly by translating to misreading from comparisons with other urban
experiences.
Asserting a notion of indirect over direct learning does not necessarily avoid the
integration of knowledge into existing power relations and histories, but it does offer the
possibility for the transformation of knowledge and theory. Translation offers a different
route from integrationist comparisons that seek to find (or try to create, even if doomed
to fail) similar sites. The challenge here is to allow for the translation of theory or
knowledge or an example from one context as it is thought through in reference to
another, but not to do so in a way that misrepresents that instance.
This is an image of translation as dialogue, the political advantage of which, as Susan
Buck-Morss (2003: 11) has written with reference to the possibilities of a global Left,
is the expansion of the discursive field. This reading of theory in travel links the
circulation of theory and knowledge to possibilities for social change. At stake here is not
simply the question of content, but an ongoing critical reflection on the structures
through which cultures of knowledge production preclude translation or allow for only
particular kinds of translation (e.g. as integration rather than critical dialogue). Indirect
learning is uncertain and provisional, and this matters if for no other reason than to admit
the role always played by the histories and structures through which we think, connect
and compare. This form of learning is uncertain not just because of its modesty and
provisionality, however, but because in widening the discursive field the occurrence of
unlikely translations can lead to the increased traversing of unfamiliar and unpredictable
terrain. There is an important challenge here in trying to contextualize and understand
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735
knowledge from places unfamiliar to the researcher texts that, for example, may
require greater effort for an outsider to grasp (Connell, 2007). One example here is
Buck-Morss (2003) connecting of some trends of Islamic thought on labour or growth
with the anti-globalization movement, a move that disrupts both the image of
monolithic Islam and the (often unwitting) reproduction of an opposition of Islam and a
progressive, international multitude.
By way of illustration, we might consider the ways in which learning through
comparison of different theory cultures can render alternative readings of theory and
the city. One example is the use of Western Marxist scholarship in the work of
historians of colonial India attached to the Subaltern Studies School. While they were
not explicitly aiming to theorize the city, some of their work does bear upon urbanism
of different sorts. In order to tell this story, it is worth recalling that Ira Katznelson
(1992: 117), writing in his sympathetic book about what he called the new Marxism
of the city (identified especially with Lefebvre, Castells and Harvey), complained that:
The new Marxism of the city . . . [is] sublimely uninterested in history. They eschew
comparative analysis. As a result, they either utilize theory cases to illustrate
theoretical points, or they treat the single-country case materials as adequate to
generate theory. Katznelson was perhaps unaware that throughout the 1980s and
beyond, well before he completed his book, a group of historians of South Asia were
developing a critical Marxism that begins to point to a comparative Marxism of
the city.
The Subaltern Studies School questioned the implicit universalizing of Western
Marxist categories for the analysis of historical change, especially in the historical
Marxism of E.P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm. Made up of scholars working on
South Asia, notably Ranajit Guha (1982; 1998) and Dipesh Chakrabarty (1989; 2000),
they sought to retain a Marxist analysis in their work on, for instance, workers
struggles within cities, but sought to split with Marxisms universalist history of
capital, the nation, and the political. In particular, they sought a split with what they
saw as a specific reading of class consciousness that did not travel well into the Indian
context. In particular, as Chakrabarty (2002) has argued, Subaltern Studies scholars
redefined the political in the South Asian context as less about evolving class
consciousness, and more about different forms of the political, especially those around
kinship, spirituality, territory and the production of cultural idiom (including local
grammars of mobilization and codes of dress, speech and behaviour). This work has
shown, for instance, that the historical struggles of urban workers often drew on modes
of peasant insurgency rather than on an evolving class consciousness. In these senses,
some of the Subaltern Studies Schools early work on, for instance, urban workers
struggles, translated or mis-read key Marxist claims about consciousness and the
political, claims which perhaps had a universalist comparative tendency within them
(e.g. Chakrabarty, 1989; 2000). They also demonstrated the importance of a variationfinding form of comparativism that makes a serious effort to learn indirectly through
different theory cultures of different contexts in this case through South Asian
history and Western Marxism. This kind of indirect learning through translation
has much to lose or gain depending on its approach to dialogue with different
theory cultures and constituencies, and this raises a complex set of ethico-political
issues.
Ethico-politics
How can our ethical and imaginative engagements with others
around the world be worked into our scholarly infrastructures?
How do we create taxonomies for cities and citizensr
that are at once off the grid and overly taxonimized?
Patricia Yaeger (2007: 15)
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Colin McFarlane
Comparative research is not neutral, and efforts to learn between theory cultures raises
ethical and political considerations (McFarlane, 2006b; Jazeel and McFarlane, 2007;
2010). I will raise two key sets of issues here: a set of commitments around strong
internationalization; and a set of questions around the role of the academic as legislator.
Firstly, strong internationalization: for Mufti (2005), there is in the formulation of
comparison an at least implicit possibility of transformation in the ways in which objects
of discussion and analysis are produced, read and debated. There are echoes here of
Saids (1993) notion of contrapuntality, a concept developed to analyse the Western
cultural archive with an awareness both to the dominated history narrated and the other
histories against which it acts. Contrapuntality, for Mufti (2005: 478) begins to encode
a comparativism yet to come, a global comparativism that is a determinate and concrete
response to the hierarchical systems that have dominated cultural life since the colonial
era. Writing in a similar vein, Robinson (2002: 532) promotes a more cosmopolitan
approach to urban studies. This is an approach that seeks to bring more cities into view
in urban studies, and that does so through a postcolonial critique of generalized, abstract
EuroNorth American analytic categories. For Robinson, this is not simply about
invoking deviation from a dominant EuroNorth American theme. Two strategies in
particular are required. Firstly, a need to decolonize EuroNorth American perspectives
by consistently asking, How are theoretical approaches changed by considering
different cities and different contexts? (ibid.: 549). This is not an attempt to add the
Third World city and stir, as if arriving at an all-inclusive picture, but to demonstrate that
the view from cities often neglected in theory-generation challenges us to develop new,
more situated understandings of emerging global patterns. Secondly, there is a need to
engage, on as close a level playing field as possible, with the work of thinkers in different
places: If a cosmopolitan urban theory is to emerge writes Robinson, scholars in
privileged western environments will need to find responsible and ethical ways to engage
with, learn from and promote the ideas of intellectuals in less privileged places (ibid.:
54950). This requires a critical epistemic interrogation and reworking, such as that
found in Appadurais (2000) formulation of strong internationalization. He writes:
[Strong internationalization] is to imagine and invite a conversation about research in
which . . . the very elements of this ethic could be the subjects of debate. Scholars from
other societies and traditions of inquiry could bring to this debate their own ideas about
what counts as new knowledge and what communities of judgement and accountability
they might judge to be central in the pursuit of such knowledge (Appadurai, 2000: 14).
This involves an ethical commitment to learning and unlearning through different theory
cultures. Drawing on Spivak (1993), McEwan (2003: 384) argues that unlearning
involves working hard to gain knowledge of others who occupy those spaces most closed
to our privileged view through open-ended conversations. Part of this unlearning
involves articulating the Western intellectuals participation in the formation of
categories like Third world city. This requires a sensitivity to the relationship between
power, authority, positionality and knowledge, but it is a set of problems that cannot
simply be acknowledged away; our positions, privileges and ways of seeing cannot be
stepped around.
The notion of strong internationalization involves a particular and reflexive
engagement with, for example, activist-intellectual forms of knowledge about the lives of
people living in informal settlements, or regimes of academic knowledge production
formulated through distinct patterns of collection, citation or judgement. There is a
challenge here for academics to connect more closely and more frequently with the
worlds, languages and vocabularies of disparate scholars and activists (Desbiens and
Ruddick, 2006; Jazeel, 2007). These ethico-political questions point to a range of
practical challenges in working across different theory cultures, including negotiating
new forms of collaboration for comparative research through journals, refereeing and
editorships, or in supporting scholarship and writing from different contexts. Other
examples of strong internationalization might include developing personal contacts and
resources, such as a fund for translations to deal with language barriers, universities and
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departments investing in graduate language skills, creating funds for exchanges and
encouraging more collaborative postgraduate programmes.
As Mbembe and Nuttal (2004: 352) argue, this involves approaching anew, as much
as is possible, the city as archive, and drawing on new critical pedagogies pedagogies
of writing, talking, seeing, walking, telling, hearing, drawing, making each of which
pairs the subject and the object in novel ways to enliven the relationship between them
and to better express life in motion gestures of defamiliarization. These issues
present, of course, a range of difficulties. Who sets the conditions for engagement? How
do we avoid these kinds of efforts becoming about us being cosmopolitan, rather than
a kind of horizontal dialogue? We need to remain mindful of the unequal resources in
which different academic contexts are set in, as well as of different research traditions,
and the demand that well-meaning Western preoccupations might place on them. For
example, how realistic is it for academics operating in the context of scarce personal
and / or institutional resources (in South and North) to be cosmopolitan?
Well-meaning efforts at producing a more international urban studies more situated in
its claims needs to explore these possibilities tentatively and through genuine discussion
and exploration. In these senses, comparativism is fundamentally about power: the
epistemic and insitutionalized relations of power between different scholarly and nonscholarly communities within and between different cultures of knowledge production,
and this entails problematizing that relationship between academic and community.
What communities do we write for? How do we constitute communities as we
perform urban studies? How can we generate networks of cooperation in urban studies
that run around and across the periphery? (Connell, 2007: 228).
The second set of ethico-political issues relate to legislation. Writing about
postmodernism in the late 1980s, Zygmont Bauman (1987: 143) argued that with
pluralism different views, knowledges, ideas, worldviews, which cannot always be
reconciled communication across traditions becomes the major problem of our time.
For Baumans postmodern academic, communication as interpretation and translation,
rather than the attempt to legislate for research, constituted a new role for the academic.
This implies conversation, dialogue, collaboration and forming collectives, rather than
what Bauman describes as a modernist view of the world that searches for an essentially
orderly totality, amenable to tools of prediction and control, with the aim of building
universals. In this postmodernist shift, community becomes a key word, over truth or
universalism. But what is this interpreter role to be? In practice, the interpreter /
legislator roles cannot dissolve: whatever community the academic speaks to, legislation
cannot be wished away. How, for example, can the academic legislate a public event by
organizing it, identifying the themes, enforcing procedural rules, etc., but retain an
explicit focus first and foremost on interpretation and translation between different
communities (groups, ideas, traditions)?
Further, interpretation itself can involve legislation as an authoritative mode of
coming to a conclusion (for example, in writing). What is required, suggests Bauman
(ibid.: 197) is a grounding of legislative authority adjusted to an intellectual scene that
is first and foremost a communication-as-interpretation process. Still, the old doubts do
not go away (ibid). The strategy here is to work with the tension between legislator and
interpreter by seeking to adopt the communication-as-interpretation role while trying to
limit the necessary work of the legislator. There are occasions when, of course,
legislation is something actively sought after to value a moral conviction and to
defend it without being stifled or numbed in the cacophony of communal traditions
(ibid.: 198). In the messiness of research, the roles of legislator, arbitrator or interpreter
are not easily distinguished, and can shift throughout the research process.
These three overlapping areas of theory culture, learning and ethico-politics matter if
comparison is to assist in producing research that reflects a more global understanding
of the urban. This outline of comparison can lead to the collaborative formation of objects
and processes of comparison, rather than a privileging of one context over another, and
seeks under constraints of history, positionality and unequal power relations not to
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Colin McFarlane
assume that one theory culture represents a norm or standard of knowledge or ways of
knowing over others. It seeks to offer a route to alternative forms of comparative thinking
and research that expands the field of inquiry and develops new positions in urban studies.
Comparison as strategy
What are the implications of this postcolonial reading of comparison for urban research?
In closing I want to identify three implications. Firstly, the theory culture, learning and
ethico-politics schema of comparison outlined above necessarily leads to rethinking, to
some extent, the practicalities, methodologies and typologies of comparative research
outlined earlier in the article. A constant process of criticism and self-criticism that
reflects on how a particular object of comparison is arrived at, and a commitment to
develop new objects, methodologies and typologies of comparison through consideration
of different theory cultures and perhaps also through new forms of collaboration, emerge
from this discussion.
Secondly, this image of comparison is potentially more open and uncertain indeed,
it implies an openness to the uncertainty of learning through comparison in different
contexts. This uncertainty derives both from an attempt to take account of the role always
played by the histories and structures through which we think, connect and compare, and
because in widening the discursive field the occurrence of unlikely translations can lead
to the increased traversing of unfamiliar and unpredictable terrain.
Thirdly, and most importantly, this reading of comparison positions comparison not
just as a generic aspect of urban thought, or as a set of methods, but as a strategy.
Strategy is dependent on the situation (Spivak, 1993); comparison cannot always be
thought of as strategy and neither is it necessarily progressive or anti-essentialist.
However, we might imagine specific forms and uses of comparison as outlined here as a
critique that is not neutral but that seeks to unsettle and destabilize knowledge and theory
as it is produced, and that seeks to reconstruct and develop new lines of inquiry amongst
a range of personal, institutional, historical and cultural inscriptions and constraints. At
its most broadly cast, comparison as a strategy of critique and alterity entails the
possibility of transforming not just theory, claims and knowledge, but the very objects of
comparison we arrive at (as the discussion of the urban political in relation to the
Subaltern Studies Schools comparative encounter with Western Marxism attests).
One way in which comparison as a strategy might proceed is through a critical focus
on genealogies of comparison. These might include genealogies of scholarly, public or
policy comparisons, with attention to how different genealogies of comparison produce
particular claims about the present, past and future of the city. What practices and
discourses shape comparison, and what work does comparison do? How do comparisons
travel? How do comparisons help build consensus, or become contested? The emerging
work in urban studies around urban policy mobilities (e.g Peck and Theodore, 2001;
Ward, 2006; McCann) is one important example here. We might consider, for instance,
how certain cities seek to draw on particular policy discourses of urban redevelopment in
their plans for the city. In my own work in Mumbai, for instance, I have been struck by
the performative force in certain predominantly elite groups in the city of
discourses of transforming Mumbai into a so-called world city of formalized global
economic flows and high-end financial, information and transport infrastructures. So,
for instance, the controversial 2003 Vision Mumbai: Transforming Mumbai into a
World-Class City policy document produced by consultancy firm McKinsey and
Company became enrolled in a broader set of processes seeking to convert Mumbai into
Shanghai a particular politico-corporate comparative reading of redevelopment for
Mumbai reflecting an integrationist comparativism, and which excludes other more
inclusive imaginaries of the urban. A crucial question at work here, then, is what is the
role of power in producing comparisons, and how is comparison contested (or not)?
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Rather than opting to limit discussion to either implicit or explicit comparison, I have
argued that retaining a broad understanding of how comparative thinking informs
research and imaginative geographies of the urban is useful for a more postcolonial
urbanism. This notion of comparison as strategy serves not just as an alternative to and
caution against integrationist or verticalizing forms of comparison, but offers one
possible route through which alternative theories of the urban might emerge. In closing,
several questions present themselves that have only begun to be addressed here. Firstly,
what if anything is specific about urban comparisons from comparisons in general?
Secondly, how do we differentiate or specify comparison in relation to its related family
of terms for example, juxtaposition, analogy, homology, mobility, connection, and
convergence? Thirdly, how should we frame the spatial analytics of comparison? For
example, how do we address lingering categories like North and South, and epistemes
of theory/development, that influence comparative thinking? I have touched on these
questions here, but they are important sites of reflection for specifying the scope and
limits of comparison in relation to the city.
Colin McFarlane (colin.mcfarlane@durham.ac.uk), Department of Geography, Science
Site, Durham University, South Road, Durham DH1 3LE, UK.
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Rsum
Quen serait-il des tudes urbaines si la comparaison tait considre non pas
seulement comme une mthode, mais comme un mode de rflexion qui claire la manire
dont la thorie urbaine est tablie? Les recherches comparatives connaissent une
renaissance en tudes urbaines, mais rares sont les tentatives de dbat critique sur
les modalits dune comparaison, notamment au-del de la division Nord-Sud. Les
pistmologies existantes de la recherche comparative se sont attaches trois
domaines: pratique, mthodologique et typologique. Sans nier la valeur de ces analyses,
un cadre de comparaison alternatif est propos ici, inspir des dbats postcoloniaux et
ax sur les cultures de la thorie, lapprentissage et lthico-politique. Cette approche
obit une conception largie de la comparaison, laquelle est positionne en tant que
stratgie. La conclusion dpeint trois implications pour la recherche urbaine.

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Volume 34.

4 December 2010 72542

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research

The Comparative City:

To distinguish the other cities qualities,

The comparative city: knowledge, learning, urbanism

Comparative research and urban studies:

The comparative city: knowledge, learning, urbanism

We may, indeed, be witnessing the beginning of an upsurge in comparative urban

Epistemologies of urban comparativism

The comparative city: knowledge, learning, urbanism

The comparative city: knowledge, learning, urbanism

The comparative city: knowledge, learning, urbanism

The comparative city: knowledge, learning, urbanism

The comparative city: knowledge, learning, urbanism

Beauregard, R.A. (2003) City of superlatives.

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34.4

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34.4

The comparative city: knowledge, learning, urbanism

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International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34.4

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