Urban comparison is most powerful when it does not begin by assuming that cities are commensurable objects, but by asking how concepts themselves travel, fracture and become revisable across different urban worlds. Jan Nijman’s formulation of comparative urbanism makes this problem explicit: the field operates between propositions valid for all cities and observations valid only for one city at one time, and therefore comparison must work simultaneously with similarity and difference rather than convert one into the residual of the other. His later insistence on a theoretical imperative strengthens this position by refusing the fantasy that urban research can avoid comparison whenever it seeks any degree of generalisation. Comparison becomes a discipline of conceptual accountability. Jamie Peck’s “Cities beyond Compare?” intensifies the debate by warning that a celebratory pluralism of difference can itself become intellectually disabling if it prevents the reconstruction of urban theory across heterogeneous cases. His argument does not restore universalism; it asks for a more multipolar, cosmopolitan and relational theoretical practice capable of engaging political economy, postcolonial critique and pan-urban processes without allowing any one geography to monopolise the terms of explanation.
Susan Parnell and Jennifer Robinson relocate this struggle within the geography of theory itself. Their call to provincialise neoliberalism responds to the demographic and political shift of urbanisation toward the global South, where inherited critical frameworks can obscure as much as they reveal when treated as ready-made explanations. The issue is not whether neoliberalism matters, but whether it should retain the privilege of defining urban difference in advance. Their intervention reopens urban theory to poverty, state formation, governance, rights and practices that arise from cities long positioned as empirical cases rather than conceptual sources. Robinson’s “The Urban Now” attacks another hierarchy embedded in twentieth-century urban thought: the alignment of urbanity with western modernity and novelty. By showing how “the new” has historically functioned as a criterion for determining which cities are allowed to represent the future, she introduces contemporaneity as an epistemic correction. Every urban setting inhabits the present, and every city can participate in conceptual production. This move becomes methodological in “Comparative Urbanism: New Geographies and Cultures of Theorizing the Urban”, where Robinson argues for revisable theory and an expanded repertoire of comparative tactics capable of starting anywhere. Instead of controlling difference away, comparison works through variation, repetition, interconnection and what she calls light-touch comparative gestures. The intellectual operation is crucial: theory is not the terminal abstraction extracted from cases but an unstable instrument repeatedly tested and transformed by them. Her later chapter on comparative urbanism and global urban studies develops this into a problem of knowledge and power, asking whose voices count, which cities shape concepts, and how urbanists can theorise across difference without returning to a single authoritative centre. “Thinking cities/the urban through elsewhere” makes the spatial structure of this practice explicit. To think with elsewhere is to place one urban situation into an analytical conversation with multiple other situations, allowing local observations to stretch, disturb or disqualify inherited concepts. The relation between one instance and many, the reach of a concept, and the methodological conventions that enable movement among contexts become part of the theory itself. Robinson’s 2022 introduction to comparative methods for global urban studies condenses the contemporary position: comparative practice should respond to globally dispersed, fragmented and interconnected urbanisation by generating concepts through multiple spatialities rather than by reproducing geopolitically crude binaries such as North/South. Comparison becomes less a table of equivalent cases than a mode of conceptualisation. Urban Planet extends this epistemology to a systems scale by integrating urbanisation, ecology, sustainability, governance and cross-scale interdependence. Its insistence that local conditions must be understood alongside regional and planetary drivers reveals why comparison is no longer optional in a world where urban processes are connected through infrastructures, resource flows, climatic systems and policy regimes. Comparative urban theory therefore becomes a practice of conceptual mobility: ideas move because cities move through one another, materially and epistemically, but concepts remain legitimate only when they register the frictions produced by that movement. A corpus organised through conceptual mobility must preserve not only references and cases but the conditions under which comparisons become persuasive. Socioplastics gains a precise methodological architecture from this. Each node can be treated as a situated proposition whose reach is neither predetermined nor confined to its site of origin. The relevant question is not whether an urban observation can be generalised in the abstract, but what relations allow it to travel, what distinctions it activates elsewhere, and where its explanatory capacity begins to fail. Nijman’s intermediate scale between singularity and universality becomes an archival rule: every item requires enough context to remain specific and enough relational openness to participate in broader conceptual structures. Peck’s concern with the limits of particularism becomes equally important because a distributed archive can easily mistake multiplicity for theory. Mere accumulation of different cities, voices or objects does not produce a comparative field. Comparison must construct a relation that generates pressure on concepts. Parnell and Robinson’s provincialisation of dominant urban theories shows how this pressure should be politically organised.
A field becomes genuinely global when the geography of conceptual authority is redistributed, allowing material from Madrid, Johannesburg, Mumbai, Kinshasa, Rotterdam or a minor peripheral site to modify categories rather than simply populate them. This alters citation practice: references are no longer only genealogical anchors but routes through which conceptual power is redistributed. Robinson’s urban now adds a temporal consequence. The corpus should resist a hierarchy in which some cities represent the future while others represent lag, tradition or incomplete development. Urban evidence enters as contemporaneous even when its histories, technologies and institutions differ radically. Such contemporaneity makes comparison more demanding because difference can no longer be explained through developmental distance. Instead, relations must be traced through circulation, repeated instances, hybrid trajectories and uneven infrastructures. The archive thus becomes a laboratory for revisable theory. A marker may initially stabilise a distinction, but repeated confrontation with heterogeneous cases should be able to bend or split it. A concept gains value through survival under comparison, not through immunity from revision. This is where Robinson’s comparative gesture is especially compatible with Socioplastics: a connection between two nodes can be light yet theoretically consequential, drawing attention to an unexpected recurrence without requiring exhaustive equivalence. One image, policy document, performance trace or spatial observation can disturb a category if its relation to another case exposes an assumption previously invisible. At larger scales, Urban Planet’s systems perspective allows these gestures to accumulate into cross-scale relations among ecology, infrastructure, governance and urban life. The corpus can therefore hold local specificity and planetary interdependence simultaneously. What matters is the architecture of passage between them. Searchability, indexing, DOI persistence and bibliographic adjacency become comparative instruments because they determine which encounters between contexts are possible. A weakly indexed corpus reproduces theoretical provincialism by hiding potentially disruptive material; a strongly relational corpus multiplies the chances that minor or distant cases can enter conceptual conversation. This also reframes authorship. The researcher does not stand outside the comparison as neutral classifier but actively constructs the third term through which cases become comparable. That construction should remain inspectable. Socioplastics can make comparison public by exposing the paths of relation—citations, tags, operators, media, locations and temporal sequences—rather than presenting synthesis as a finished universal statement. Conceptual mobility then becomes an ethics of abstraction: concepts are allowed to travel, but they must carry traces of where they came from, what they excluded and how they changed in transit. The field becomes global not by erasing difference but by making difference operational in theory production. This architecture of comparison also permits contradictions to remain productive. When two cities generate incompatible interpretations of the same process, the field need not resolve the disagreement by choosing a superior case or abandoning comparison. The contradiction can instead become a diagnostic object that reveals the hidden scale, history or institutional assumption supporting each claim. Comparative work thereby acquires a recursive function: it not only produces concepts but tests the conditions under which concepts cease to hold. That recursive quality is especially valuable for a large distributed corpus because theoretical refinement can occur through accumulated friction rather than periodic replacement of one total framework by another. Within Socioplastics, this condition condenses as RegimeMutation.
Anto Lloveras is an architect and urban researcher working across urban theory, comparative epistemology, archives and spatial infrastructures through LAPIEZA LAB and Socioplastics.
Bibliography
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