The Limits of Comparative Methodologies in Urban Studies

Abstract

This chapter argues that revitalising the comparative gesture is an important requirement if comparative methods are to be put to work for global urban studies. It seeks to understand, then, why it is that in an intrinsically comparative field with an urgent contemporary need for thinking across different urban experiences, urban studies for a long time had relatively little in the way of comparative research. The chapter reviews inherited conventions of comparative research in urban studies, with a view to recasting comparativism in service of global urban studies. Reviewing existing strategies for comparing cities, it considers the potential for comparative methods to overcome these constraints to meet growing demands for a global and post-colonial urban studies. The scope of urban comparative research has been profoundly limited by certain longstanding assumptions embedded in urban theory; assumptions which propose the fundamental incommensurability of different kinds of cities.