ABSTRACT
Theorizing cities can benefit from a comparative imagination, but comparative methods need to be refitted to support a more global urban analytical project, including a substantial reconfiguring of the ontological foundations of comparison. In turning to articulate new dimensions of theorizing cities from elsewhere, authors have sought new geographies of authority and voice. Conceptualisations of the urban, if they are to respond to the interconnectedness and emergent unpredictability of the diverse forms of cityness in a world of cities need to be formulated as radically revisable. The call for a more global urban studies is in some ways well formulated as an insistence on more critical ‘planetary’ reading practices. The intrinsic comparativism of urban studies can be put to work more purposively, and the repertoire of comparative strategies has been expanding through attention to relational comparisons and to the need to formulate comparative methods which are adequate to the specific spatialities of cities.
