ABSTRACT
This chapter elaborates comparative urbanism, especially in the Asian context. It discusses insights from the project to discuss the challenges and opportunities of comparative urbanism. Drawing from an ongoing comparative research project on cross-border housing and real estate investments in Brunei-Miri and Singapore-Iskandar Malaysia, the chapter provides the methodological and theoretical challenges and opportunities in actualizing comparative urbanism in these two Southeast Asian contexts. It describes the emancipatory possibilities of comparative urbanism, especially through conducting "unexpected comparisons" across carefully selected sites. After an overview of debates in comparative urbanism, the chapter explains the rationale for the project and introduce the empirical contexts. Through surfacing commonalities and diversities across seemingly unconnected sites, comparative urbanism contributes towards a more nuanced and contextualized intellectual field, and a more comprehensive understanding of cities and their varied urbanizations.
