ABSTRACT
This upsurge in comparative research has been multifaceted, and includes – and this is by no means exhaustive – efforts to compare one city with several (Nijman, 2007a, on Miami); comparing two cities (Huchzermeyer, 2007, on the production of informal settlements in São Paulo and Cape Town); exploring how specific processes or features recur or diverge in different cities (Gulger, 2004, on world cities in the South, or Roy, 2005, on planning and citizenship across North and South); research outlining frameworks for comparative urban research (Brenner, 2001; Kantor and Savitch, 2005); and work developing an explicitly postcolonial (Robinson, 2006, 2011; McFarlane, 2010) or relational (Ward, 2010) revisioning of comparative urbanism. In short, comparison is firmly on the agenda of urban studies, whether as a way of experimenting with the diversity of cities across and beyond inheritances of global North/South or global city/megacity, as a means for thinking through the relations between case studies and wider processes, or – increasingly – as a resource for locating difference rather than similarity (McFarlane and Robinson, 2012).
