ABSTRACT
How can one produce conceptual explanations about urban space that are sensitive to empirically given social processes that contribute to making cities dier from one another, amid and despite the vigour of the current global urbanization trend? This theoretical issue, which has been mobilizing sociologists in various academic contexts in the US and Europe (for example, Sassen 1991, 2008, Berking and Löw 2008, Löw 2009), is of special interest to me as a Brazilian sociologist and anthropologist living in and doing research on São Paulo. Although Brazilian urban contexts are experienced in practice as being dierent from Paris, London, Chicago, Los Angeles or New York, these cities often inspire, empirically speaking, the sociological city notions that present-day Brazilian research relies upon to explain, in theoretical terms, this country’s urban space. Notions such as fragmentation, gentrication, global cities and segregation underpin the Brazilian debate (Frehse and Leite 2010). They bring to the interpretive forefront what is mutual among urban contexts amid and despite the elements that make them dier from each other. Empirical dierences become (in)voluntarily subject to similarities. In extreme cases, dierence entirely disappears from the conceptual agenda (Frehse 2012).
