Comparative Urbanism: New Geographies and Cultures of Theorizing the Urban

In response to the growing interest in ways to take forward an agenda for a more global urban studies, this essay advocates a comparative approach to theory building which can help to develop new understandings of the expanding and diverse world of cities and urbanization processes, building theory from different contexts, resonating with a diversity of urban outcomes but being respectful of the limits of always located insights. The essay is inspired by the potential of the comparative imagination but, mindful of the limitations of formal comparative methods, which in a quasi‐scientific format can drastically restrict the scope of comparing, it outlines ways to reformat comparative methods in order to put them to work more effectively for a more global urban studies. The essay proposes a new typology for comparative methods based on the vernacular practices of urban comparison, tracing these through the archives of comparative urbanism. It also suggests some lines of philosophical reflection for reframing the scope and style of theorizing. New repertoires of comparativism are indicated which support the possibility of a revisable urban theory, starting from anywhere.     

The Real Estate Frontier

Africa's major cities are experiencing dramatic transformation as a result of growing real estate investment. This article explores whether existing theories can explain the dynamics of urban redevelopment in an African context, and how African cases can inform new theorizations of real estate driven urban transformation. Examining the utility of theories of gentrification and speculative urbanism for understanding urban redevelopment in Accra, Ghana, it argues that urban redevelopment in this city has been shaped by its particular (post)colonial history of state land acquisition and urban planning. Rather than simply identifying empirical variation on established theories, however, the article draws on recent research on commodity frontiers to propose an original theorization of urban redevelopment in Accra in terms of the production of a ‘real estate frontier’. This real estate frontier is characterized by the incremental and contested commodification of state land to enable the growth of the real estate sector in the city. The article concludes by calling for a comparative research agenda to better understand real estate frontiers globally.     

Is Comparative Gentrification Possible? Sceptical Voices from Hong Kong

This essay responds to a series of critical observations made in an intervention in this journal (vol. 41.3) concerning our earlier article on gentrification in Hong Kong (vol. 38.4). In the current rejoinder we bring this particular exchange to focus on the broader question of whether comparative gentrification research is even possible; a question that exemplifies the dualism in the literature between global urban theory and the emphasis inherent within comparative or regional urbanism. Our attempt to present an interpretation of urban transformation in Hong Kong that bridges this dualism was challenged by our critics on grounds that are similar to those identified by Jamie Peck in his 2015 analysis of a comparative urbanism that seeks to undercut global urban theory. We use this intervention to examine several of these arguments critically, and conclude by continuing to promote a comparative approach to the study of gentrification, dominated neither by planetary theory nor by regional specificity.     

INDIGENOUS URBANISMS

Indigenous urbanism is an analytic and vital experience that captures everyday life and extreme moments of conflict in settler colonies. While highly localized, Indigenous urbanism/s are comparable across time and space. Delivered from different parts of the world, the essays in this collection highlight that Indigenous urbanism is politically, socially and culturally significant not only for Indigenous peoples in cities, but also for urban settlers and non-Indigenous people of color. While Indigenous urbanisms are foregrounded by settler-colonial structures and processes, they also underscore the unresolved nature of social relations in cities, and indeed, the unsettled character of the city itself. This introduction briefly sketches the themes and scope of each essay and draws them into conversation. Taken together, this collection illustrates the relational—rather than reactionary—character of Indigenous urbanisms as structure, in and of the (settler) city. Indigenous urbanisms shape cities by engaging with broader categories of human relations, intimate connections, conflict and resistance.     

Identity Building Through Mediation by African Tailors

In contemporary African cities, dressing well and wearing exclusive garments has become crucial for people in search of identity, distinction and individuality. The research presented in this article, situated at disciplinary intersections of cultural studies, fashion practices and sustainability, provides a case study of African tailors conducted in Maputo and Lisbon, with a special focus on identity building of African immigrants in Portugal. However, the role of tailors in this acculturation process has been ignored in the consumption approach to creative cities. This study is therefore also a reaction to the mainly Western world of regular couture, and to ‘creative city materials’ that focus on consumption. Instead, we emphasize the importance of African tailors who de facto shape urban experiences—visually incrementing practices—that are fundamental to the comprehension of sartorial culture, while we also allude to the complex intersections between local and global markets. In the first part of this article we describe a semi-ethnographic study among tailors in Maputo and Lisbon. The second part presents a participatory action approach that entailed developing an educational programme for African tailors where culture and creativity meet. This programme empowered tailors to tap into their cultural knowledge on tailoring and their awareness of community identity. In our study we argue that the idea of creative cities and their creative economy should be approached from a cultural perspective, by building awareness of the importance of local creative classes instead of focusing on importing those classes.     

THE POLITICS OF URBAN ECOLOGY: Paul Duvigneaud and the Rise of Ecological Urbanism in Brussels during the 1970s

Today, design disciplines such as ecological urbanism aim at fusing natural and social sciences to restore the equilibrium between social and natural systems, and in extenso the urban and natural environment. But recent literature in urban political ecology and urban history has shown how this socioecological approach is generally stripped down to a merely ecological perspective, ignoring the sociopolitical side of the urban ecological project. I therefore argue that there is a need for a research programme that interrogates the history of the interaction between ecology, planning and politics. In this article I respond by developing a historical perspective on the rise of the ecosystemic approach towards the city, delving into the agency and political nature of ecological science itself. Through an in-depth historical analysis of the Brussels school of urban ecology and urban ecologist Paul Duvigneaud, I highlight how urban ecology influenced politics through its association with the regional government and vice versa to argue that ecological knowledge was used to overcome political opposition, incorporate a specific regionalist agenda and build an ecological zoning practice in urban planning policies.     

Understanding Urban Processes in Flint,Michigan: Approaching ‘Subaltern Urbanism’ Inductively

Ananya Roy introduces the concept ‘subaltern urbanism’ in her 2011 article ‘Slumdog Cities: Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism’. She challenges researchers to move beyond existing epistemological and methodological limits, and offers four concepts which, taken together, serve as a useful starting point for understanding and representing subaltern urban space. In this article I argue that instead of a deductive approach that begins with an a priori identification of slums as subaltern urban space, an inductive approach of identifying subaltern urban space would expand the concept and show that subaltern urbanism exists in the global North. I present original research to show that Flint, Michigan, can be considered subaltern urban space. In the final section of the article I argue that this inductive approach to subaltern urbanism can foster comparative research across the North‐South divide, and generate the transfer of knowledge from South to North.     

URBAN REGENERATION IN SEOUL: Alternative Urbanism or the Resilience of Neoliberal Urbanism?

Park Won-soon, the former mayor of Seoul, put forward a new vision of Seoul as a progressive city, and one of his signatures was the promotion of a new urban regeneration policy called the Seoul-type Urban Regeneration Model (SUR). It was first presented as a solution to compressed and profit-oriented urban redevelopment but evolved into an alternative model which conveyed the worlding desire of the Seoul Metropolitan Government to redefine Asian urbanism beyond developmentalism or neoliberalism. In this article, we argue that the SUR demonstrates a mixture of post-developmentalist features and the lingering impact of neoliberal rationalities. Specifically, we problematize SUR's hybrid aspirations for urban competitiveness, improved quality of life and participatory governance by articulating how the pursuit of a globally competitive city conflicts with and overrides other values and how citizen-centered governance was exploited as an efficient mechanism of neoliberal urbanism.     

Declining suburbs in Europe and Latin America

Suburban shrinkage, understood as a degenerative urban process stemming from the demise of the Fordist mode of urbanism, is generally manifested in a decline in population, industry and employment. It is also intimately linked to the global restructuring of industrial organization associated with the rise of the post-Fordist mode of urbanism and, more recently, the thrust of Asian industrialization. Framed in the discourse of industrial urbanism, this article examines the first ring of industrial suburbs that developed around large cities in their most rapid Fordist urbanization phase. These industrial suburbs, although they were formed at different times, are today experiencing specific mutations and undergoing profound restructuring on account of their particular spatial position between the central area and the expanding peripheries of the post-Fordist metropolis. This article describes and compares suburban decline in two European cities (Glasgow and Paris) and two Latin American Cities (S?o Paulo, Brazil and Guadalajara, Mexico), as different instances of places asymmetrically and fragmentarily integrated into the geography of globalization.     

Placing Property: Theorizing the Urban from Settler Colonial Cities

In the conspicuously geographical debate between ‘North’ and ‘South’ urbanism, settler colonial cities remain displaced. They are located in the ‘North’ but embody ‘South‐like’ colonial dynamics and are hence neither colonial nor postcolonial. Heeding the call to theorize from ‘any city’, this article aims to contribute to a more systematic theorization of the urban from settler colonial cities. In it we focus on the work property does to materialize the settler colonial city and its specific relations of power. We identify three faces of property—as object, as redress and as land—and use case vignettes from Israel/Palestine and Australia to consider how each register continues to inform the functioning of settler colonial cities. We find that, through property, dispossession and settlement are continuously performed and creatively enacted. At the same time, the performance of property reaffirms the endurance of Indigenous land systems amid ongoing colonization. The article makes a contribution to contemporary debates in urban studies about the importance of surfacing the specificities of urban experiences around the world, while further unsettling the dissociative nature of urban property.     

Strategies for Comparative Urbanism: Post‐socialism as a De‐territorialized Concept

The aim of this article is to critically assess the study of post‐socialist cities with respect to comparative urbanism. Even though comparative urbanism has challenged the division of the world into largely incommensurable regional containers, where some regions are sources of theory while others remain in the periphery of thinking, post‐socialist cities have remained doubly excluded: neither centre nor periphery, neither mainstream nor part of the critique. This article introduces three ways in which post‐socialism has and could be perceived: as a container, as a condition and as a de‐territorialized concept. It is argued here that seeing post‐socialism as a de‐territorialized concept that would apply to particular aspects of cities and societies rather than territorialized units in general would allow cities regularly seen as post‐socialist to be incorporated into global urban theorizing, while distinctive local histories and experiences still remain analytically present. The article cautions researchers against area‐based imaginations of urban theorization, instead arguing in favour of an approach that sees cities first and foremost as ordinary while some aspects could be claimed to be post‐socialist. Tallinn is used here as a site from which to draw examples for this mainly literature‐based conceptual analysis.     

Where is Urban Politics?

We outline the rationale for reopening the issue of the spatiality of the ‘urban’ in urban politics. There is a long tradition of arguing about the distinctive political qualities of urban sites, practices and processes. Recent work often relies on spatial concepts or metaphors that anchor various political phenomena to cities while simultaneously putting the specificity of the urban itself in question. This symposium seeks to extend debates about the relationship between the urban and the political. Instead of asking ‘what is urban politics?’, seeking a definition of the urban as a starting point we begin by asking ‘where is urban politics?’. This question orients all of the contributions to this symposium, and it allows each to trace diverse political dimensions of urban life and living beyond the confines of ‘the city’ as classically conceived. The symposium engages with ‘the urban question’ through diverse settings and objects, including infrastructures, in‐between spaces, professional cultures, transnational and postcolonial spaces and spaces of sovereignty. Contributions draw on a range of intellectual perspectives, including geography, urban studies, political science and political theory, anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, planning and environmental studies — indicating the range of intellectual traditions that can and do inform the investigation of the urban/political nexus.     

Elite Compacts in Africa: The Role of Area‐based Management in the New Governmentality of the Durban City‐region

Through reflection on the practical post‐apartheid (re)alignment of competing rationalities across the Greater Durban urban region, this essay teases out the interface between traditional and modern settlement management systems, and explores how governance cleavages are being renegotiated and mediated. It is suggested that, in building an integrated method of operating across the fragmented city‐regional scale and navigating the competing interests involved, the practice of African urbanism is being defined. Without making any claims for what may or may not be uniquely African city‐regional dynamics at the boundaries of tradition and modernity, what is clear from the Durban case is that both conventional city‐regional literature and new city‐regional ideas have glossed over the complexity of finding solutions to tensions between poor communities, urban managers, elected local authorities and the traditional rural elites of the functional city‐regions of Africa.     

Florida in the Global South: How Eurocentrism Obscures Global Urban Challenges—and What We Can Do about It

According to Richard Florida, the world is in the grip of a ‘New Urban Crisis’. In his most recent book Florida recounts a visit to Medellín that provoked an epiphany in which he realized that the New Urban Crisis is global in scope. Unfortunately, Florida's discovery of the global South is informed by a deeply Eurocentric understanding of urbanization. This leads him to conclude that Southern cities should ‘unleash’ creativity, and he proposes that the United States should develop a global urban policy that would export a version of American urbanism. In this essay we deconstruct Florida's notion of the New Urban Crisis and show that its Eurocentric assumptions obscure the very real environmental, economic and political challenges facing cities in the global South and their residents.     

What Role for Social Science in the ‘Urban Age'?

There is growing recognition of a new human ascendancy: ‘the urban age’. Rising interest in urbanism is evident in popular literature, the media and major global institutions. And yet, as with another great issue of the age, global warming, there is evidence that social science is being sidelined from a rapidly enlarging field of human concern. New urban knowledges are forwarded from the physical sciences and from popular commentary that are characterized by naturalism and its kindred tendencies, especially determinism. In this essay I consider why social scientific urbanism seems increasingly marginal to an ever broadening urban discussion. The regressive consequences for human knowledge and prospect are essayed. The essay's final part is prospectus: for a revivified social scientific urbanism that draws from Sayer's recent argument for renewal of critical human knowledge.     

Entrepreneurial Religion in the Age of Neoliberal Urbanism

The introduction to this symposium on entrepreneurial religion and neoliberal urbanism discusses leading scholarly approaches to religion and urban theory, arguing that, despite their merits, these approaches are in need of refinement. Theories on religion and urban theory too often describe religion as a reactionary phenomenon. Religious movements and spaces are generally defined as pockets of resistance and shelter against retreating or failing states under neoliberal restructuring programmes in the shadow of consumption dreams. Although religious actors and ideologies unquestionably form part of urban groups that are denied access to public and private means to wealth and security, the contributors to this symposium argue that within a global, comparative perspective, the entwinement of religion, state and market reveal more complicated configurations. Through a comparison of Islamic gated communities in Istanbul, Pentecostal prayer camps in Lagos and Pentecostal grassroots movements in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, this symposium demonstrates that urban religion should also be regarded as a constitutive force of contemporary capitalism and should therefore be placed at the heart of the neoliberal construction of urban space instead of at its margins.     

Who's Afraid of Postcolonial Theory?

Recent assertions of urban theory have dismissed the value of postcolonial critique in urban studies. This essay draws on postcolonial theory to demonstrate key flaws in such theoretical formulations. In doing so, it returns to the puzzle of how and why studying urbanism in the global South might matter for the reconceptualization of critical urban theory. Instead of a universal grammar of cityness, modified by (exotic) empirical variation, the essay foregrounds forms of theorization that are attentive to historical difference as a fundamental constituent of global urbanization. What is at stake, the essay concludes, is a culture of theory, one that in its Eurocentrism tends to foreclose multiple concepts of the urban and alternative understandings of political economy. A concern with the relationship between place, knowledge and power—a key insight of postcolonial critique—might make possible new practices of theory in urban studies.     

城市中心区的街道设计策略

城市郊区化和街道荒漠化是当前城市建设所面临的重要问题.为了避免城市中心区的衰退,建设富有活力的街道空间,提高城市公共空间品质,需要调整现行的技术主义的街道交通设计策略,实施城市主义的街道设计策略,使得街道空间真正成为能够结构社区的市民生活空间.     

Urban Entrepreneurialism Vs Market Society: The Geography of China's Neoliberal Urbanism

Existing literature on China's neoliberal urbanism is preoccupied with its institutional incentives and political-economy dynamics, which are characterized by state dominance through sponsorship and supervision of capital-market operations that drive pro-growth aspirations and gentrification strategies. Meanwhile, society, confronted with brutal neoliberal production of urban space, is vulnerable to dispossession and displacement. In this article, we draw upon an ethnographic study conducted at the Higher Education Mega Centre (HEMC) of Guangzhou in an attempt to revisit China's neoliberal urbanism beyond the Marxian political-economy repertoire, and shift the theoretical focus from production to consumption. In an institutionalized neoliberal context, the state–market–society nexus is closely intertwined—a process that manifests itself as the entangling of state and market, the establishment of a market society, the reflexive effects between neoliberalization and Chinese urban entrepreneurialism, and the capital-centric rule in urban (re)development. In particular, the socioeconomic and sociospatial contradictions in the HEMC case indicate aggressive and insatiable production of urban space, which has been led by the entrepreneurial local state, but is bounded by the market-oriented and capital-centric rules of institutionalized neoliberalization. The article concludes by calling for pragmatic reflection on the ‘hard’ neoliberal urbanism of the global South.     

Slumdog cities: rethinking subaltern urbanism

This article is an intervention in the epistemologies and methodologies of urban studies. It seeks to understand and transform the ways in which the cities of the global South are studied and represented in urban research, and to some extent in popular discourse. As such, the article is primarily concerned with a formation of ideas - "subaltern urbanism" - which undertakes the theorization of the megacity and its subaltern spaces and subaltern classes. Of these, the ubiquitous ‘slum’ is the most prominent. Writing against apocalyptic and dystopian narratives of the slum, subaltern urbanism provides accounts of the slum as a terrain of habitation, livelihood, self-organization and politics. This is a vital and even radical challenge to dominant narratives of the megacity. However, this article is concerned with the limits of and alternatives to subaltern urbanism. It thus highlights emergent analytical strategies, utilizing theoretical categories that transcend the familiar metonyms of underdevelopment such as the megacity, the slum, mass politics and the habitus of the dispossessed. Instead, four categories are discussed — peripheries, urban informality, zones of exception and gray spaces. Informed by the urbanism of the global South, these categories break with ontological and topological understandings of subaltern subjects and subaltern spaces.