Doing comparative urbanism: comparative conversation as tactic

Abstract

This paper offers comparative conversation – that is, formal comparison across cases invoked in sequential, recursive, and incremental fashion – as an experimental tactic for thinking the urban across difference. It provides a chronological, self-reflexive account documenting the emergence, operationalization, and achievements of comparative conversation across collaborative urban experiments in Shenzhen and London. The account showcases the emergence of comparative conversation as a function of the intersection between the personal geographies and comparative ambitions of the researcher and how the meandering and complex process of the comparison led to analytical and conceptual innovation. In so doing it contributes to ongoing calls for the renewal of the comparative method by positively demonstrating the role of the researcher in making viable an experimental comparison by leveraging the shared features of different urban contexts as a generative starting point for comparison. The paper concludes by suggesting that all comparative tactics must generate concepts of value and discusses the mediation between risk and rigor in novel forms of comparison.

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