Comparative Urbanism: Tactics for Global Urban Studies

"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, andthe 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?"--
COMPARATIVE URBANISM ‘Comparative Urbanism fully transforms the scope and purpose of urban studies today, distilling innovative conceptual and methodological tools. The theoretical and empirical scope is astounding, enlightening, emboldening. Robinson peels away conceptual labels that have anointed some cities as paradigmatic and left others as mere copies. She recalibrates overly used theoretical perspectives, resurrects forgotten ones long in need of a dusting off, and brings to the fore those often marginalised. Robinson’s approach radically re-distributes who speaks for the urban, and which urban conditions shape our theoretical understandings. With Comparative Urbanism in our hands, we can start the practice of urban studies anywhere and be relevant to any number of elsewheres.’ Jane M. Jacobs, Professor of Urban Studies, Yale-NUS College, Singapore ‘How to think the multiplicity of urban realities at the same time, across different times and rhythmic arrangements; how to move with the emergences and stand-stills, with conceptualisations that do justice to all things gathered under the name of the urban. How to imagine comparatively amongst differences that remain different, individualised outcomes, but yet exist in-common. No book has so carefully conducted a specifically urban philosophy on these matters, capable of beginning and ending anywhere.’ AbdouMaliq Simone, Senior Research Fellow, Urban Institute, University of Sheffield The rapid pace and changing nature of twenty-first century urbanisation as well as the diversity of global urban experiences calls for new theories and new methodologies in urban studies. In Comparative Urbanism: Tactics for Global Urban Studies, Jennifer Robinson proposes grounds for reformatting comparative urban practice and offers a wide range of tactics for researching global urban experiences. The focus is on inventing new concepts as well as revising existing approaches. Inspired by postcolonial and decolonial critiques of urban studies she advocates for an experimental comparative urbanism, open to learning from different urban experiences and to expanding conversations amongst urban scholars across the globe. The book features a wealth of examples of comparative urban research, concerned with many dimensions of urban life. A range of theoretical and philosophical approaches ground an understanding of the radical revisability and emergent nature of concepts of the urban. Advanced students, urbanists and scholars will be prompted to compose comparisons which trace the interconnected and relational character of the urban, and to think with the variety of urban experiences and urbanisation processes across the globe, to produce the new insights the twenty-first century urban world demands.