The Art of Comparison

Lusaka and Sacramento might seem, on the face of it, an odd comparison. But this is precisely the point. Given that belief in the incommensurability of worlds is a by-product of the western parochialism described above, the comparison that this thesis is based upon is not conducted ‘on the face of it’. This research is not a comparison of the two points on the globe which through their shared ‘urbanity’ have come to assume the identity of ‘cities’. It is equally not a comparison of what the two cities envision themselves to look like in the year 2030 and therefore a comparison of the sorts of planning and design policies and ideas that are embodied within these plans. For too long cities have been judged, aggregated and compared with one another on the basis of their relative ‘success’ or ‘failure’ as urban spaces. For example, in terms of what might be described as specific ‘model cities’, certain criteria are often used by policy makers and the media to rank cities in various ways (Ward 2010). However as illustrated by McCann (2004), such criteria are constantly shifting; reflecting the latest perceptions of what constitutes ideal ‘cityness’. Highly subjective in nature, this greatly influences what is to be considered the ‘hot’ area of focus for urban development and works to define certain ‘truths’ about desirable urbanism.

While urban studies grapples with diversifying its understanding of ‘the city’, urban geographical research struggles with the question of how to maintain its own relevance to what is a seemingly diverse and unique roster of locales. One particularly prominent means of exploring this is by debating the role and nature of comparison in how we approach this ‘world of cities’ (Gough 2012; McFarlane 2010; Peck 2014; Robinson 2015; Ward 2010). There is now somewhat of a “renaissance in the field of comparative urban studies” (Ward 2010: 471) and an embrace of a “comparative gesture” (Peck 2014: 178). Building on his ‘relational comparative approach’that sees cities as “open, embedded and relational” (2010: 481), Ward (2015) describes what he sees as two dominant approaches to comparative research as being conducted either ‘from above’ or - as he advocates for - ‘from below and through’. This offers a way of exploring, theoretically, the ways in which “cities are regularly being compared and

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referenced against each other on a global scale” (McCann et al 2013: 582). Indeed, ‘relationality’ and ‘comparison’, when deployed together it seems, offer an insight into the ‘scaled understanding’ of the world of cities and their positioning with regards to one another (Peck 2014). These evolving discussions about a ‘return’ to comparative urbanism can be seen as attempting to open up the potential for a cross-examination of future urbanisms that can delimit the comparative aspect and become more flexible and analytically rigorous in the opening up of urban theory’s resource base (Robinson 2011).

Following on from the previous discussion about taking a view from the south, the fundamental question to ask of comparative urban research however, is not just how it is done but the critical agenda being sought. It would seem that in much of these debates, there is still a heavy theoretical agenda at play, in which comparison is sought not as a way of understanding the world in order to tackle particular, situated problems, but to rebalance and reconstitute ‘urban theory’ in a more ‘cosmopolitan’ fashion (Robinson 2003). In other words it should not be a problematisation of which ‘view’ is taken of a particular city and its place in the world as argued by Ward above, but the concept of the view itself - as detached and self- referential in its defining of ‘the city’ as an object of study. Criticised by Derickson (2014) as being an exercise in ‘add-other-and-stir’ (ibid.7), these accounts don’t appear to offer a political project with regards to the shared struggles of the majority of the world’s cities, in the way that was argued for in the previous section. As Saldanha (2006: 21) argues “cosmopolitanism has to be invented, not imposed”. Indeed, one thing that is missing from much of the debate around comparative urban theorising is the methodological implications which are, of course, bound up within the question of what it is exactly that is being ‘compared’ about different cities.

As McFarlane (2010) argues, comparison in research enquiry is always implicit. Whether drawing upon the insight of one case or fifty, it is never merely a question of “compare and contrast” but always one that also involves “judging and choosing” (Sidaway 2013: 995). By making comparison completely explicit (by taking control of what is compared through the selection of a pre-stated similarity) and the rationale for doing so just as clear (to engage in sustained critique of how the world is produced, rather than merely represent it) can therefore help avoid slippage into what one might expect things to be like in a certain place. It can also avoid a more dangerous slippage into assumptions as to the structural inevitability

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of phenomena and the situating of the researcher in the position of a transcendental, omnipotent sovereign with privileged access to a world of connections ‘out there’ beyond what is material. Rolling it back to its “minimal expression” (Robinson 2015), comparison, then, should be seen as a ‘strategy’ which, following Mbembe and Nuttall “relies less on difference” as an inevitability of the particular, and more on a critical engagement with the shared (2004: 351):

“Though the work of difference has performed important functions in the scholarly practice that sought to undercut imperial paradigms, it is clearly time, in the case of Africa, to revisit the frontiers of commonality and the potential of sameness-as- worldliness. This is a far cry from a proposition that would aim at rehabilitating facile

assumptions about universality and particularity” .

This form of comparative research also provides a register of enquiry which allows us to engage with and accept fundamental differences in a way that addresses the concern of Vigh and Sausdal (2014) as to how we “describe ontological others in ways that do them ethnographic justice” (ibid.49). Using the terms the authors use to portray either side of their dilemma, by doing this we ensure that our comparison is orientated on existence and not on essence. It is the ability of the comparative empirical approach to circumvent, or rather to de- centre ‘theory’ that is its most important characteristic. It is, through comparison that we can bring together an epistemological critique, informed by postcolonialism as described above, and an ontological paradigm of research - to be further explored below. The fact that the ‘ontological turn’ is tied particularly closely to the work of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro helps to further rationalise these connections and to act as a platform in building towards critical ontologies that draw from beyond the project of the west in their conceptualisations of alterity.