Comparison in motion: Anthropologies of connection and difference in urban research

Abstract

In recent years there has been renewed enthusiasm for comparison within urban studies: a call for comparison that does away with conventional units of analysis and is more experimental. Recent directions in studies of comparative urbanism have urged urban scholars to move on from the tightly controlled comparisons of (usually) Northern cities and to think instead with variation, creativity and alternative modes of citymaking. Drawing from recent analytical directions in anthropology as well as Édouard Glissant’s ‘rhizomatic thinking’, we aim to take up the call by AbdouMaliq Simone to think through what comparison does, where and how it happens, what it sets in motion and what this means for how we understand difference. What we propose in this commentary is twofold. Firstly, we attend to how acts of comparison, and lines of connection and difference, are embedded in all kinds of processes of living, knowing and transforming the urban. Here, comparative urban research is one comparative mode among many. Secondly, we advocate thinking through the possibilities of what comparative acts give rise to, whether assemblages, ethics, materialities, socialities or politics. In doing so, situations can be brought into conversation with each other and new scholarly, analytical connections can be drawn. In seeking to understand such divergent phenomena, whatever they may be, generative analyses can be made in urban research – conceptual, material and/or theoretical – that might otherwise remain out of sight.

Introduction

In recent years there has been renewed enthusiasm for comparison within urban studies: a call for comparison that does away with conventional units of analysis and is more experimental. Robinson (2022), Le Galés and Robinson (2024), Robinson and Roy (2016) and Schmid et al. (2018) have urged urban scholars to move on from the tightly controlled comparisons of (usually) Northern cities and to think instead with variation, creativity and alternative modes of citymaking. This call has been powerful and vital, particularly coming on the wave of decolonial critiques of knowledge-making practices, and the importance of recognising – and undoing – the forms of power embedded in research methodologies and modes of analysis. It is significant then that this call for comparative urbanism is global in its scope, aiming to develop forms of urban theorising that work with the multiplicity of urbanisation processes across the world, rather than assuming that European or American cities form any kind of baseline for understanding what or how the urban should be (Robinson and Roy, 2016).

There is no blueprint for this new comparativism: its very point is that it should be methodologically as well as conceptually experimental and open-ended, building towards what Robinson (2016: 195) has described as generative comparative strategies. In this, different phenomena or situations are brought into conversation with each other from which new connections can be made. Such ‘open and agile’ (Robinson, 2022: 3) analytical encompassment allows connections to be drawn between ‘distinctive social formations and the complexity and multiplicity of social dynamics’, emphasising the need to utilise a ground-up approach Le Galés and Robinson (2024: 9). As Schmid et al. (2018: 28) have noted approvingly, ‘In this understanding almost every question or problematic could be productively handled, and concepts would by principle stay open and revisable’. Their recently published Handbook of Comparative Global Urban Studies is indeed a vast compendium of potential approaches to new comparative directions, including diverse theoretical frameworks, research methodologies, methods of analytical comparison and examples – from large-scale, carefully delineated methodologies to more allusive reflections on possible modes of engagement.

In addition to finding lines of connection, comparison is inevitably about grappling with, and thinking across, difference. As anthropologists, we are all too aware of the pitfalls of mapping and organising difference. Across various disciplines, but particularly anthropology, comparison forms part of a problematic scholarly history – the legacies of which are still reverberating – where comparison was used to generate hierarchical orderings of social and cultural difference that helped to underpin colonial and racialised systems of power. The current comparative turn in urban studies is of course a long way from this and is starting from a very different premise: it acknowledges the problematic history of comparison and calls instead for something more generative, inclusive and non-hierarchical. Nevertheless, it is an important reminder that when we discuss comparison the questions at hand are not only what is to be compared, and how, but also what do comparative gestures generate. What is needed, Simone (2024: 313) has argued, is ‘a fuller appreciation of what comparison actually does’.

In this piece, we aim to take up this call by Simone to think through some of the implications of what comparison does. This opens up wider considerations of where and how comparison happens, what it sets in motion and what this means for how we understand difference. If the intention of the comparative turn is to shake up forms of knowledge production about cities – to revitalise our understandings of the character of the urban – then the call for new methods, perspectives and modes of analysis that work with (rather than control for) the messiness and complicated frictions that constitute the urban is of course welcome and, some would argue, long overdue. As urban anthropologists, this is a mode of knowledge production with which we are comfortable. Anthropology has at its heart a focus on lived experience and grounded understanding, and ethnographic research aims for inductive rather than deductive modes of theorising that start from the contradictory and contingent ways in which things play out on the ground.

What quickly becomes apparent when we take this view from the street is that researchers are not the only ones doing the comparing. Comparison is all around us – everyone is doing it, whether they are urban residents, technocrats, policymakers or academics. Many anthropologists have described how their interlocutors are also engaged in modes of comparative thinking, from city traders (Zaloom, 2010) to citizens and engineers engaged in energy monitoring (Knox, 2021) to peri-urban communities trying to reclaim ancestral lands (Miyazaki, 2004). This draws attention to what Deville et al. (2016: 20) have called ‘the situated practice of comparison’. They argue that while comparison is of course always an epistemological as well as a methodological project, these epistemologies are just one part of the wider infrastructures of comparison that shape the world we are in. Whilst as scholars we make comparative acts as a mode of making sense of the world and generating knowledge about it, everyone makes comparisons in their day-to-day lives: people contextualise themselves in relation to others, institutions and their perceptions of spheres of power. Processes of differentiation and hierarchy making are part of how we come to know ourselves, and how we differentiate ourselves from others. Comparison is also central to decision making about how urban investments, development projects or policies are mobilised, whether via global rankings, indices of need or inequality, future-focussed modelling or frameworks for measuring concepts like sustainability or resilience. It forms part of modes of appraisal, contrast and difference drawing that underpin much of professional life. From this perspective, comparisons – and the relationalities that arise from them – are a fundamental aspect of how the world – including the urban world – takes shape. If we would like urban studies to work from a more grounded and open-ended way ‘upwards’, then as urban researchers we need not only revitalised comparative methods or modes of analysis. We need to understand the effects of diverse comparative acts on constituting the urban itself, and how these cumulatively influence the differences and connections across neighbourhoods, cities or urban regions.

What we propose in this critical commentary is twofold. Firstly, we urge renewed attention to comparison itself as a site of empirical inquiry that encompasses a range of actors (human and nonhuman), infrastructures and practices (Deville et al., 2016). Acts of comparison, and the lines of connection and difference that such acts generate across multiple scales, are embedded in all kinds of processes of living, knowing and transforming the urban. Secondly, we advocate thinking through the possibilities of what peoples’ comparative acts give rise to: the assemblages, ethics, materialities, socialities, politics and beyond. In seeking to understand such divergent phenomena, whatever they may be, generative analyses can be made in urban research, conceptual, material and/or theoretical, that might otherwise remain out of sight. Here, comparative urban research can draw from comparisons already occurring in urban spaces as ways to ‘rethink … analytical strategies’ (Gad and Bruun Jensen, 2016: 189). We posit that this process is aided by thinking through recent directions in anthropology as well as Glissant’s (1997) notion of ‘rhizomatic thinking’. This can give rise to ‘ground-up’ analytical approaches within urban studies that reveal connections across and within urban spaces in surprising ways, ways that are shaped by the nature of contemporary urban lived experience. Such approaches can encourage embracing creativity in analytical connection drawing that is both reflective, and revealing, of the nature of contemporary and emerging urban processes. Here, forms of comparison can happen simultaneously and intersect with each other – by urban inhabitants, policymakers and practitioners and between different forms of research conducted from the ‘ground up’.

Relation drawing on the ground

In his work on ecopolitics and environmental action in Hong Kong, anthropologist Choy (2011) observes how comparative acts across diverse scales and registers bring themes of urban environmentalism and conservation into being. He shows how processes of differentiation and hierarchy making are fundamental to environmental action, from categorisations of endangered species to areas identified as in need of protection, investment or activism. Through this process, comparative acts then build associations between different actors, places and politics, such as how an urban park can become a campaign site for an environmentally-focussed political party. As such, he understands comparison to be an act of ‘relation drawing’ undertaken by diverse sets of people across multiple domains, and that cumulatively this drawing of relations is a process through which a given event, place or object is brought into view and made to matter (Choy, 2011: 18). Important here is not just what connections are made and what is brought into the frame but also what gets left out in the process. In the case of the urban park, before it can be ‘saved’ from urban development, it must be constituted as something worth saving – so through various comparative acts it is enframed as a space of wildlife diversity, of clean air, or as a site of ecological importance, whilst other green spaces are rendered less remarkable or significant in the process. This produces what Choy calls ‘ecologies of comparison’ in which different scales of urban inhabitation, curation and rearrangement rely on diverse modes of comparison – such as international treaties, national and city-level politics, ecological research, vocabularies of environmentalism, local community action – that are then drawn into relation with each other to produce objects of attention.

Following Choy, it becomes apparent that for a comparative urban researcher, an approach that is committed to working from the ground up and thinking with and through difference – as the new comparative urbanism advocates – cannot do justice to the urban terrain without comparison becoming part of the empirical focus: by acknowledging and attending to the ways in which comparison has constituted the field of research in the first place. One of the interesting things about this realisation is the way that it situates the comparative work of the researcher within a wider field of comparison – research becomes visible as one practice of relation drawing among many others. This has two effects. Firstly, it draws attention to the constitutive power of research: if comparative acts are generative of how urban sites and objects are made to matter, or indeed shaped and brought into being, then research is one part of these extended ecologies of comparison. And secondly, it shifts the positionality of the researcher from an external observer of the city to a practitioner – research isn’t sealed off from urban processes but is embedded within them.

Such positionalities have been explored by Gad and Bruun Jensen (2016) in their ethnographic work on comparative actions within a Danish fishing fleet. They highlight the significance of comparative relations that already exist in the field, proposing that ‘it is not the prerogative of social scientists to conceptualise and compare, for ethnographic fields are rife with such efforts’ (Gad and Bruun Jensen, 2016: 190). They draw on Maurer’s (2005) notion of ‘lateral reason’, developed in his work on alternative currencies and Islamic banking in the USA, who found that his interlocutors were ‘fellow travellers along the routes of social abstraction and analysis’ (Maurer, 2005: xv). This lateral reasoning, Maurer argues, helps to collapse the epistemological distance between ‘observer’ and ‘observed’, and to recognise that the projects and knowledge practices of interlocutors may not be so different from those of the researcher (see also Riles, 2001). Instead, both researcher and interlocutor engage in drawing relations – between people, places, practices or ideas – both ‘contingently and laterally’ (Maurer, 2005: 10). Here, researchers work alongside interlocutors’ own ‘lateralisations, their interconnections with each other’ and the researcher (Maurer, 2005: xv). What emerges is research that evokes the multifaceted plurality of comparisons, or what Niewöhner and Scheffer (2008) have called ‘thick comparison’; that is, grounded research that focuses on the production of comparability itself. This can be done in situ, can guide research frameworks and can give rise to further research-driven comparison a posteriori (Montero and Baiocchi, 2022). Any reflexive, embedded research is inevitably implicated in this comparative plurality. As Gad and Bruun Jensen (2016: 195) put it, researchers thus need to ‘pay close attention to how ethnographic comparisons interact with comparative endeavours already occurring in the field, and how this produces comparability and “objects of comparison” ’.

Recognising that urban research is embedded in the way that the urban is brought into being raises questions of ethics and responsibility: about the effects of research and how it shapes the ways in which cities are known and made, and its context within wider disciplinary histories. This recognition of responsibility is crucial if we are to take seriously the intention for a new comparative urbanism to be part of wider calls for decolonising research and working towards repairing power asymmetries embedded in processes of knowledge production. In our discipline of anthropology, the politics of knowledge has included a long and difficult conversation about what comparison does, and how the discipline has at different times been both complicit in, and deeply critical of, colonial and racist conceptualisations of hierarchy and difference. As noted by Candea (2018: 6), anthropology ‘cannot evade the shadow cast on our disciplinary visions of comparison by imperial western projects of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’. As far back as the 1920s, Franz Boas, one of the foundational figures of anthropology, renounced anthropology’s ‘comparative method’, which at the time was a means of distinguishing and locating cultures along a racially segregating evolutionary hierarchy. In his account of this moment in the discipline, Choy points out that what is less well remembered is that this did not mean that Boas refused to think comparatively, but rather that he rejected what it was that comparative differences were presumed to mean. Choy (2011: 6) observes that Boas ‘cautioned us about the frame in which anthropologists emplotted the various cultural specificities they encountered in their work’.

The point here is not that there is a fundamental problem with comparative thinking per se, nor that as scholars we don’t all inevitably make comparative acts. Rather, it focuses attention on what it is that comparison sets in motion: how the act of comparison is embedded in the mobilisation of ‘difference’ as a constitutive framing of the world. ¹ We need, as Choy argues, to make explicit ‘the stakes and politics that attend particular lines of comparative thinking’ (Choy, 2011: 6–7). As Deville et al. (2016: 31–32) suggest:

What is at stake when practising comparison cannot, and could never have been, whether comparison is good or bad, or whether it should be avoided. The question is rather which comparisons and which comparative infrastructures we want to implicate ourselves in, what we seek to understand with them … and how we want it to relate to the field.

Fast forward to the later part of the 20th century and up to the present day, and whilst comparison remains ambiguous and demands continuous re-examination, it has also formed a fundamental part of anthropology’s ‘critical self-questioning’. The important critiques of the discipline’s historic practice of comparison (what Gad and Bruun Jensen (2016: 189) call anthropology’s ‘classical grand style’) notwithstanding, a more nuanced and open-ended comparative sensibility is still fundamental to anthropological work. The intent of ethnographic theorising, at least since the ‘critical turn’ of the 1980s (see Clifford and Marcus, 1986; Fabian, 1983), has been to work inductively and reflexively from the ground up. Here, any critical reflections start from the understanding that analysis must situate the anthropologist and the fieldwork itself within the analytical frame, rather than trying to externally apply grand theoretical frameworks or ‘ideal types’ and identifying what does or doesn’t fit within such typologies. It is this more critically engaged attachment to comparison as an analytic that can allow the discipline to be a ‘permanent thorn in the side of western pretensions’ (Candea, 2018: 7).

A comprehensive outline for developing more equitable and inclusive comparative urban research is beyond the length and scope of this short intervention. However, there are certain areas where a commitment to comparison as an empirical as well as methodological and analytical approach overlaps with more ethical sensibilities. If, instead of using pre-established benchmarks or hypotheses for what constitutes ‘successful’ or ‘failed’ urbanism, we are aiming to work with what we find – to theorise from the ground up – then this ground-level perspective is an important starting point. Anthropology has long prioritised the need to look ‘out from’ small places, ‘looking from [their] place in the world’ (Agard-Jones, 2013: 183) as a way to productively understand connections and linkages. The recent work of Sophie Chao also provides a similar, timely reminder. Her 2022 ethnography places front and centre intertwined Marind theories of multispecies relationships, the agency of oil palm, and the impact of agribusiness expansion in West Papua amid the plantationocene. In detailing Marind theorising, Chao reflexively queries the implications of utilising theories established elsewhere to explain phenomena for which Marind people have their own explanations. As she moves ‘back and forth between theorizing ethnography and ethnographizing theory’, Chao aims to use this reflexive approach to theoretical deployment as part of a goal to ‘collapse the hierarchical distinction between Western theory, and non-Western cosmology’ (Chao, 2022: 7). This resonates with the comparative turn’s call for more reflexive modes of urban engagement that ‘learn from elsewhere’ to develop ‘new cultures’ of urban theorising (Robinson, 2016: 188). We argue that any such culture of theory making should not only work with and from the forms of comparison that people themselves are already engaged in but also take seriously their modes of theorising.

Such an approach relies on an immersive positionality, rather than a distanced scholarly gaze where cities are observed from the outside. It implies that not only ‘data collection’ but theory building is undertaken in situ – metaphorically, if not literally. It resists comparative work being shaped by preconceived ideas as to what phenomena or places are innately comparable, instead working with the wider ‘ecologies of comparison’ that appear on the ground. Such an approach to urban research will inevitably prompt the emergence of new kinds of relation drawing, in Choy’s terms, as the research and researcher are drawn in to the urban frame. Such a positionality needs to be acknowledged but is not necessarily problematic: it is these ecologies of relation that shape the nature of comparisons being made and indeed the form of urban theorising itself. From this embedded position that acknowledges urban research as part of a wider landscape of comparative acts, the constitutive effects, responsibilities and ethical imperatives of comparative research become much more visible. We develop this further in the next section on drawing relations of difference and connection and the ethical imaginings that can foster new understandings of the urban.

Difference and connection

Reflecting on the constitutive power of comparative gestures, Simone (2024: 312) points out that there is a danger that comparison can actually flatten difference, ‘by making everything more salient to each other, more interoperable’. Instead of setting up comparative frameworks in which cities are understood as the embodiments of distinct differences, it can be helpful to recognise the different characters of comparative acts. There are both ‘inside out’ and ‘outside in’ modes of comparison through which difference is generated, and that there is a constant interplay between them:

That which comes from the inside, the indeterminacy generated by the … apparently familiar, are … projected onto an outside, so that they may be either embraced, disattended to or defended against. At the same time, that which emanates from a larger surround can be selectively folded in as … an active countervailing frame of reference … or as an implicit resource for the ongoing revitalization of cultural orientations themselves. So, there is a double projection at work, working from the inside-out, and the outside-in. (Simone, 2024: 315)

Simone makes clear that forms of encounter and projection are part of how people make sense of themselves, their cities and the world around them, variously folding in, rejecting, absorbing or ignoring those influences, ideas and encounters within their daily lives. Such forms of relation drawing are both mundane and efficacious, whether drawing external influences inwards into existing frames of reference or projecting inside experiences outward. We could also add that this ‘double projection’ echoes a rather anthropological sensibility to making sense of the world, another indication of the ways in which research practice is just one iteration of comparative thinking.

The emphasis on encounter and finding affinity with other people and other places also evokes the importance of what Henrietta L Moore (2011) terms ‘the ethical imagination’: the way in which projects of self-making rely on drawing connections and comparison. She examines how encounters with others (known, but also unknown – such as those encountered through music, film or social media) generate the re-imagination of self–other relations. Here, new forms of sociality or new mediatised knowledge intersect to produce new socio-material infrastructures that alter ways of being and acting in the world. For example, joint work by Constance Smith and Henrietta L. Moore (2020) on ‘digital Kenya’ examined how Kenyan authorities made comparisons between digital transformation elsewhere in the world and what this could mean for digital futures in Nairobi – connections that were made through investments, vision strategies and the explicit echoing of Silicon Valley by naming Nairobi as a future ‘Silicon Savannah’. But perhaps more significantly, this research also found that all kinds of Kenyans – including those who seemed to live a life far removed from digital transformation or startup culture – saw affinities and connections with the digital world that made ‘being digital’ not (only) an indicator of one’s proficiency with new technologies but a way of indicating belonging: of seeking to locate oneself within a time of change, and to animate new forms of participation and relationality. Terms like ‘digital’ and ‘dotcom’ were captivating in their possibility, examples of how the ethical imagination is a mode of engaging across time and space – and a way of making sense of the relation between the individual and the collective.

In terms of urban research, this was significant not only because the digital became a way to identify the links between efficacious comparative acts across scales, from official policy and strategy to everyday modes of living in Nairobi, but because it showed how the city itself was being constituted through these diverse modes of ‘being digital’. It shaped people’s ideas about how the city worked, and how it might offer a more connected, more global, urban future. ‘Being digital’ offered Nairobians imagined encounters with known and unknown others, whether in Kenya or around the world, and a way to anticipate their participation in – and contribution to – Nairobi’s digital future. In this way, considering what connections are made – or refused – by different people, from residents to policymakers, reveals dynamics of urban transformation that are directly shaped by modes of comparison. Attending to what these comparative acts generate – in this case, ideas about digital futures and belonging – offers new pathways for analysing and theorising the urban.

For Moore, the ethical imagination also consists of significant moral reflections. That is, it forms ‘a labor that seeks to address the query: “how should I live” with myself and with others?’ (Moore, 2020: 30). Across both our work, and in much other anthropological literature, people are shown to contextualise their place in the world through projects of self-imagining and self-making. These projects can consist of forms of relating to others, places (intracity and beyond), materialities and processes that are both distant and proximate in varying, unfolding gradations. Such ethical imaginings were visible to Rebekah Plueckhahn during fieldwork in 2015–2017 in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. During research on new financialised mortgage arrangements, people speculated on whether or not a new, relatively affordable mortgage scheme would be beneficial, not just to themselves but also to a wider network of relations in which they were deeply interconnected (Plueckhahn, 2020). This included senses of shared responsibility in a wider context where people were asking themselves what were the right courses of action that would provide kinds of economic stimulus during periods of economic flux and downturn. Buying an apartment through this scheme brought networks of financialisation into the home (Christie et al., 2008). New forms of relation drawing emerged among residents and people working in the financial sector, relation drawing that spanned across residential and financial, local and national spheres. As people engaged with and deliberated over the implications of new financial instruments in this postsocialist city, this deliberation gave rise to proliferating and diverse economic imaginaries of urban financial and material interconnectivity (Appel, 2014).

Affective histories

When thinking through the cumulative effects of urban comparison, we find Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (1997) to be particularly enriching for tracing how relation drawing, connection and difference can form networks or assemblages across time and space in ways that help to decentre hierarchies of knowledge. Emerging from the layered abysses of the middle passage and the ‘depths of the sea’ that forcibly carried 30 million enslaved people from Africa to the Caribbean, Glissant (1997: 6) describes the ‘debasement more eternal than apocalypse’ that produced a terrifying, radical and lasting reformulation of humanity. As well as the violence and fragmentation, Glissant argues, this produced a radically divergent relationality and realignment of perspectives that still spans outwards from across Caribbean islands and the Americas. Here, relation, Glissant (1997: 8; 9) writes, ‘is not made up of things that are foreign, but of shared knowledge’, where ‘we know ourselves as part and as crowd, in an unknown that does not terrify’. While relationality and comparative acts are not always borne from deep histories of trauma and displacement, what Glissant refers to is a pivotal space where ‘rooted’ colonial or other hierarchies are juxtaposed alongside, or deconstructed by, dispersed relatedness – in a ‘poetics of relation’.

This presents new interpretations of directionality, from one that is rooted and ‘arrowlike’ to one that redefines relation, surface and depth as archipelagic, or volcanic, interlinked by submarine and subterranean connections (see also Garnier, 2021). Glissant (1997: 33–34) writes:

the Caribbean, as far as I am concerned, may be held up as one of the places in the world where Relation presents itself most visibly, one of the explosive regions … the reality of archipelagos in the Caribbean or the Pacific provides a natural illustration of the thought of Relation.

Drawing from Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, Glissant (1997: 11) also applies a rhizomic paradigm to think about ‘the Relation’, where ‘each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other’. ² Here, ‘the poetics of relation interweaves and no longer projects’ (Glissant, 1997: 32). Importantly, Glissant (1997: 32) asks ‘how many different problematics, secreted in how many other regions of the world … come to encounter the problematic we raise here?’

In his critique of comparison, Simone (2024)– drawing on Hortense Spillers – powerfully invokes how urbanising practices are also shaped by long, painful histories of difference, including colonial, racist and classist hierarchies and segregations. As such, cities are spatialities that are the ‘residues of both acknowledged and disavowed encounters, where the subsequent spatialisation of differences reflects the processes and politics of how these encounters are managed’ (Simone, 2024: 316). Even as cities have always been places of aspiration and opportunity for some, they are also spatial archives of differentiation, segregation and inequality – legacies of the dark history of comparative systematisation, the afterlives (or outright continuation) of which can shape people’s ‘possibilities of encounters with others’ (Moore, 2020: 35). The persistent vestiges of Apartheid urban segregation for South African cities, or the transformational urbanising force of the Great Migration for North American cities, suggest – in contrasting ways – how urban life has always emerged in response to histories of power and forms of rearrangement and inhabitation (Moore, 2020: 33).

People thus live within historical conditions of connection and difference not necessarily of their own choosing, and urban residents must do their own imaginative work from within these comparative remains. In turn, this influences the work of the ethical imagination and how people draw relations between themselves and elsewhere. As well as historical legacies, this imaginative work is shaped by normative assumptions and distributions of power but – significantly – it is also malleable and responsive to the ‘contingency of the present’ (Moore, 2020: 30). Thus, although undoubtedly influenced by the environing urban world in which they find themselves, people are never fully bound to only one way of perceiving themselves and others in the world. The urban is thus both stage and actor; a place shaped by histories of comparison as well as processes of ethical imagination, and which simultaneously conditions the imaginative acts in which ‘individuals produce different kinds of knowledge of, and specific ways of connecting with, the world, themselves and others’ (Moore, 2020: 30).

Our interest in comparison is in a similar mode: to acknowledge the powerful historical legacies of comparative differentiation that is foundational to so many cities, whilst also recognising comparison as an imaginative, always in-the-making process of relation drawing. Although many residents are well aware that they live within potent spatial histories, these pasts are not always explicitly articulated or invoked, even though atmospheres may persist. As Simone has argued, much comparative action takes place in a register that is affective and uncertain, rather than categorical: ‘Differences generated are different in that there is no ready language to account for and incorporate them … They act as sources of illumination’ (Simone, 2024: 315). Among these shape-shifting encounters, ‘there will be things that people can’t quite put their finger on, an affective sense that something is taking place that is awaiting a suitable term or mode of appearance’ (Simone, 2024: 316). Our approach draws on this sense of uncertainty to find ways of engaging in comparison as a formative process that enables us to think through speculative linkages that might not yet be categorised. We hope this can be a way, as urged by Robinson, of thinking beyond difference and similarity, or controlling for difference and equating connection with similarity, where, if doing so, one can both potentially flatten difference or lose sight of worthwhile connections that may have not yet become apparent (Robinson, 2022: 4–5).

Resonant qualities

Thinking rhizomatically presents unfolding constellations of connections and comparative acts. These forms of relation making are dynamic, reacting to and shaped by various challenges, questions, quandaries and experiences across scales. Understanding them allows us to trace how relations are shaping urban life, such as climate change and weather events, human–nonhuman relations, economic reordering or expectations of modernity to provide adequately or last into a previously anticipated future. In this vein, following similar conceptual, material or social phenomena arising in different urban spaces reveals realignments that can provide insights into changing material environments and resulting socio-political reformulations.

For example, we have noted in our research in Nairobi and Ulaanbaatar, respectively, how varying forms of vernacular assessments of quality and rearrangements of materialities are fundamental to processes of urban construction, placemaking and home. These ideas about quality are being made in contexts where supposedly ‘objective’ systems of authentication and quality control are inadequate, misapplied or even suspect. Instead, in Nairobi, construction workers draw on physical, sensory encounters with materials – such as what ‘good’ sand or bricks should look, feel and sound like. They also make assessments about quality based on imagined differences with elsewhere. Cement imported from China is thought to be ‘weaker’ than local Kenyan cement, despite being subject to more rigorous testing. This understanding is rooted in notions of national vigour and strength, and experiences of cheap Chinese consumer goods that have flooded local markets and which are often described as ‘fakes’.

Similarly in Ulaanbaatar, luxury apartment housing is quite often sold on the premise that its componentry is verifiably from upper-scale European manufacturers. Residents across different socio-economic areas speculate on the materiality of internal and external building construction and componentry in the quest to understand their true chanar (quality). Assessments of quality within urban living range widely, and can be applied to different building materials, facades or public areas, forming part of an assessment about whether these tools and spaces of everyday life can be relied upon and will last well into the future. Such assessments of quality in both cities suggest both inside-out and outside-in comparative gestures, where local urban histories, a global construction industry and first-hand sensations of quality are folded into the same frame in an ‘ecology of comparison’.

In some ways, this recalls what Jacobs (2006) termed the examination of ‘repeated instances’ as a form of comparative urban research. In her work on policy mobilities as grounds for comparison, Robinson (2018) expanded on Jacobs’s argument, proposing that the ‘repeated instance’ helps us to go beyond the notion of the ‘case study’. While the case study is usually regarded as ‘a singularity, which … stands only for itself’, following a ‘repeated instance’ such as policy as it moves across multiple cities makes new lines of connection visible to researchers, and thus makes new forms of comparison possible (Robinson, 2018: 228). For Robinson, this is one example of how comparison can start anywhere, and comparisons and analytical insights can be built across a wide diversity of urban experience. We would suggest that such orientations are very much in keeping with the practice of contemporary anthropology, even if it is not always described in the same vocabularies. In our own work on quality, we are now beginning to go deeper into what might be revealed through comparative resonances and constellations between Nairobi and Ulaanbaatar. For example, what can putting these different ideas about quality into dialogue reveal about linkages across postcolonial and postsocialist urbanisms shaped by for-profit development and global trade? And what do different assessments of quality reveal about the formative ethics emerging within qualities of urban life more broadly?

Conclusion

A consideration of ‘comparison in motion’, as we have titled this short intervention, is a response to Simone’s (2024: 313) call for ‘a fuller appreciation of what comparison actually does’. The recent comparative turn in urban studies is a rich opportunity for taking this seriously – not only a moment for new ideas about what can be compared and how, and a timely reckoning with academia’s own practices of comparative knowledge production, but also a moment to grapple with the ways in which comparative acts are fundamental to processes of city making. Firstly, by making comparison itself a site of empirical inquiry, diverse ‘ecologies of comparison’ become visible, in which researchers’ reckonings with connection and difference are just one form of comparative gesture among many. Brought into the frame of what is constituting the urban in this way, the ethics and responsibilities of comparative research are foregrounded. Secondly, this embedded positionality allows a way of thinking through the urban by tracing the networked forms of relation drawing that emerge from it, to understand similar phenomena arising in and across different urban spaces. Thinking through the ethical imagination, for example, brings attention to forms of encounter and the ways that we differentiate ourselves from, or find points of connection with, known and unknown others. These comparative gestures are made from amid the ‘residues’ (Simone, 2024) of long histories of other – sometimes deeply violent – comparisons that have shaped the urban terrain in which we find ourselves today. Though sometimes indeterminate or speculative, relational linkages accumulate; they draw connections across time and space, and across very different contexts, with constitutive effects. As Moore (2020: 33) puts it, ‘the urban is already one kind of response … one set of intersecting materialities within which humans try to formulate and enact their responses’ to questions of how we should live with others, and what lines of difference and connection we are prepared to draw.

What can emerge in this comparative analysis (both innately a part of urban making as well as conducted by researchers) is quite open. If thinking through a poetics of relation, linkages can explode like a network (Glissant, 1997: 195). These linkages may challenge or contradict previous hierarchies of knowledge, or add new perspectives to existing ones. However, the aim is not necessarily to solely replace or overturn previous ways of doing things. Rather, ecologies, networks or rhizomes of comparison can form ‘recombinant narrative[s]’, which ‘“loop[s] the strands” of [seemingly] incommensurate accounts’ (Hartman, 2008: 12). Comparative research is part of the ‘rhizome in action’, a complex set of connections and relations that criss-cross each other, where difference and connection become part of the ways that urban phenomena, experiences and concepts come to be and to matter.