Constructing comparisons: Reflecting on the experimental nature of new comparative tactics

Introduction: Comparison as an experiment

Comparative urbanism, the value of thinking from and with elsewhere, has preoccupied critical urban studies for over two decades. Robinson’s (2013) call to arms – to think from different places, to use alternative cases and sites as a way of challenging our understandings of cities, and to theorise in a way that does not reinforce existing hierarchies – has birthed a range of important responses (see e.g. Mosselson, 2017; Ren, 2020; Wood, 2016). Comparative urbanism is canon. Yet the question of exactly how to do this comparative analysis – the exact ways of putting into practice this powerful tool within urban studies – has evaded much of this written intellectual discussion (Teo, 2022). Instead, the question of how has been debated at sessions at the American Association of Geographers (AAG) annual meetings, the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) annual conference and more recently in online workshops (for example Malmo Institute for Urbanism’s workshop on dislocating urbanism), as well as, of course, in conversations between supervisors and students, and colleagues. Comparison is a hard process – to think ‘with elsewhere’ when you are deeply embedded in another context requires cognitive leaps and deliberative action to overcome existing hierarchies. The researcher must also grapple with addressing the missing tacit ‘know how’ which comes with being (from) somewhere else. In this special issue we see the emergence of a more experimental approach to comparison that responds to the particularities of the situation the researcher finds themselves in – their personal histories and positionalities – and ultimately pushes forward the comparative agenda by demonstrating new ways of putting places into conversations. To be experimental in this regard means to craft new methods of both data analysis and collection.

For Robinson (2016), there are clear means by which the comparative agenda can be put into practice – tracing connections across places, starting from places relatively neglected in wider analyses, and thinking through difference. As I have argued elsewhere, assembling a method for comparison can productively draw these three approaches together to create a generative multi-pronged approach to comparison (Brill, 2021). However, to push forward comparative urbanism means opening to a wider range of methods (see Streule, 2020) and in this commentary I reflect on the experimental nature of many of the methods discussed in this special issue. On a theoretical level, experimenting with new ways of doing comparison clearly demonstrates the limits of existing categorisations and theorisations within urban studies (see e.g. Mosselson, 2017; Parnell and Robinson, 2012). Authors in this special issue are working in new ways and generating their own comparative tactics – the implications for their individual thematic or theoretical analyses is evident in their papers. Taken together these researchers demonstrate what it means for a comparison to be experimental and what the benefits of this are for (a global) urban studies more broadly.

What does it mean for comparison to be experimental?

Being experimental is central to the radical approach in geography and urban studies (Pickerill, 2019). As a noun, ‘experiment’ is to do a trial or a test to check a hypothesis, akin to more traditional methodological approaches to comparison. But experiment as a verb is to try something new. This is the root of the experimental approaches to comparative urbanism that have emerged in recent years (see Lancione and McFarlane, 2016). To be experimental can also mean to employ an artistic technique involving radically new approaches and style or invent a new thing or idea based on less established ways of doing things. Experimentation can therefore be understood as an orientation to knowledge (Kullman, 2013), in this case thinking through difference or the question of ‘why is it this way here?’. To be experimental in comparison is therefore to approach comparative urbanism outside traditional approaches and to adapt the methods to the case – to respond to what happens and to think outside the box about how to collect data and how to analyse it in a way that productively challenges established ways of thinking in urban studies. In this issue, authors are experimental with how they do comparisons, and with where, in terms of the cities they are located in and research and the sites within that from which they turn to develop their comparison. Who is doing the comparison is also a crucial ingredient in the experimentation.

The clearest way in which the authors in this collection demonstrate their experimental nature is in how they do the comparison – thinking through the practicalities of data collection and analysis in a way that challenges existing understandings of how comparison can be done. In some papers this is comparison as a back and forth – the continual questioning that straddles two places (Niranjana, 2022; Teo, 2022). The back and forth was, by Niranjana’s own arguments, a trial-and-error approach. It embodies the experimental nature of comparative tactics developing during the course of the research and is illustrative of the potential for a less structured, more reactive approach to identifying and unpacking processes and using those insights to continually question what is happening elsewhere. In other forms of experiment, Saraiva (2022) utilises the benefits from established ways of constructing comparison – for example employing the relational approach advanced by Massey (1994) and others – and stretching it to work in new ways. As Saraiva shows in their ¹ work across Brazil and South Africa, using ideas of assemblages to focus on how policies are disassembled in the course of a learning exchange highlights the possibilities of a comparative agenda that foregrounds political dynamics in the two case study cities (São Paulo and Durban). This approach demonstrates the potential for a comparative agenda attuned to the singularities of the case – as they disassemble the constituent parts of policy-making processes it becomes evidence of the particularities of each city and how these shape the wider strategies and outcomes of the policy-making process. It also speaks to the wider urban processes beyond the case. Rather than seeing the cases as generalisable, as in traditional case studies structured as ‘experiments’ in the positivist sense, this approach helps connect the ‘big’ issues, questions and focus of much analysis in urban studies (e.g. the role of international finance, the strategies of global consultants, resistance movements) to the precise local circumstances that mediate and shape the particularities of a case. This experimental approach, directed by the methods and practices of the actors being analysed themselves, mimics the processes being researched to unveil elements that would otherwise be hidden.

Experiments in the ‘where’ are arguably the most discussed part of the comparative agenda and more broadly in work on the geographies of experiment (see Kullman, 2013 for an overview). Experimental sites can be understood as ‘characterised by different conditions and parameters, expectations and outcomes’ in a way that highlights their role as a ‘space not only for scientific experimentation but for diverse modes of ‘artisanal’ innovation’ (Kullman, 2013: 885). For advocates speaking from places less well represented in urban studies, thinking from or with the elsewhere is a way of overcoming the limitations of heavily hierarchical understandings of cities and the related dominance of particular places in informing theorisations. In my own work, for example, I have had to justify why it matters to not translate currencies always back to the US dollar – even if this would make it more palatable for American and other audiences (Brill, 2021). Comparison, in my case putting into conversation sites in London and Johannesburg, looking for instances of repetition and leading with the question of ‘why is it not like that here’ can bring in the everywhere, the anywhere and the elsewhere through continual self-reflective practices of awareness – creating unpredictable and unexpected comparisons. This is most powerful when exposing the theoretical, academic and policy implications of questioning long held assumptions based on just a few repeatedly analysed places. The potential for comparing ‘anywhere’ and ‘everywhere’ is evident, for example, in Myers’ (2014) work on Connecticut and Zanzibar, and can also be seen in more recent housing studies analysis (see for example Lemanski, 2021).

In this issue we see Teo put ostensibly incomparable cases front and centre, rooted in an attempt to experiment with different places and open up different conversations. Thinking through and across the vastly different places of Shenzen and London demonstrates how experimenting with not just how but where comparisons are undertaken brings new places into existing conversations irrevocably altering the conversations themselves. For Teo the experimental, recursive approach to analysing projects as they unfold across vastly different locations enabled them to push back against concepts such as state entrepreneurialism (dominant in Chinese urban theory) austerity (dominant in UK urban theory) and instead generate deeper analytical insights emergent from both contexts. In this way an experimental approach directly informs a more global urban studies by returning to the question of thinking with the ordinary city of Robinson’s (2013) earlier work – and encouraging any and all of these ordinary places to be in comparison to one another. Building on this and arguably experimenting further, Niranjana’s (2022) comparison of Chennai and London’s infrastructure demonstrates the potential for producing analytical insights across cases which are assumed to be so divergent they are rarely seen together. Experimenting with the ‘where’ of comparison has the potential to dramatically challenge not just where we should situate our empirical research but also how we could engage and create dialogues with scholars in different contexts in order to continually assess the extent to which our analysis is limited by singular studies or by being situated in a particular place.

Finally, it is important to reflect on the pragmatic realities of conducting comparative research which are so evident in this special issue: who is doing the comparing? The articles in this issue highlight the way our personal histories feed into how we approach the sites we are engaging with and therefore how we begin our comparison. Crucial here is the difference we bring to cases and what that does in term of shaping any challenges to pre-existing understandings of cities and urban life. Constructing comparisons is challenging (Deville et al., 2016) but a more experimental approach enables researchers to dynamically react to the situation(s) they find themselves in. Being experimental can (but does not have to) mean being open to change and adaptive to different circumstances as they arise in the course of the comparison. For Teo (2022) the experimental approach is about instigating and working with the unexpected. On a practical level, for those of us with intimate professional knowledge and extensive connections in one place, being open to changing strategy and being experimental in how we collect and analyse our data can enable us to navigate uneven levels of access across cases – which may or may not be apparent from the outset. Methods begin long before data collection, as McFarlane (2010) argues and more recently Söderström (2021) emphatically highlighted. We understand places based on our prior experiences – even before we start to construct our methods we are thinking about our sites through the ‘anywhere(s)’ we know well. The process of case selection and research design is informed by these understandings and for those deliberately pushing back against leaning on their knowledge from just ‘some’ locations, this stage includes ensuring they read widely and in doing so have grappled with the specifics of (multiple) local circumstances as much as they can. In this issue we see how our individual differences shape the theoretical implications of comparative approaches – for Teo having some (albeit limited) prior connection to both sites suggested the approach of looser conversations as a method; for Niranjana an uneven relationship across her two research sites (knowing one case much better than the other) led them to follow a minor theory approach. The reality of what we can see as researchers – what is visible to us, what remains out of reach and how we can engage – inevitably shapes what types of comparison we can construct. In being reactive to these circumstances, these authors demonstrate taking their positionality as a powerful starting point for thinking about new ways of doing comparison. Being experimental, by its nature, does not guarantee we can design research success, especially with elements as fragile as securing access and varied local awareness. Being experimental in our way of approaching research design therefore not only opens new ways of finding connections or altering our understanding of what a concept might mean in another setting, but rather as is shown throughout this special issue, is an opportunity to react creatively to the challenges of comparison.

Conclusion

In conclusion, for a more global urban studies our methods need to reflect the diversity of places which it is possible to theorise from and with – and how we relate to those places. For those of us embarked on the comparative urbanism agenda putting sites into conversation, tracing connections and looking for instances of repetition have proved productive in challenging how urban studies has entrenched particular places and their corresponding characterisations. To take forward the comparative approach the papers in this special issue demonstrate the potential of experimental approaches – challenging how we do comparison, where and what we put into these conversations from our own positionality and history. On this basis, authors bring forward comparative experiments and innovative theoretical insights by making their approaches adaptive (see Brill, 2021; Niranjana, 2022; Teo, 2022). Experimenting and adopting an experimental ethos towards research design and implementation offers a way to embody the radical potential of critical geography and urban studies.