Nijman defines comparative urbanism as the systematic study of similarity and difference among cities and urban processes, located between statements true of all cities and statements true only of a particular city at a particular moment. The conceptual power of the essay lies in making place-specificity and generalisation mutually dependent rather than opposed. Nijman argues that comparison had suffered from the decline of methodological self-consciousness during the postmodern turn, when universal categories and developmental models were rightly criticised but comparison itself was often abandoned with them. His methodological intervention is to recover comparison without returning to scientism. Space and time must enter explanation rather than remain residual variables, categories must stay contextually variable and temporally dynamic, and comparative frameworks must be made explicit. The essay bridges historical sociology, geography and globalisation studies, establishing an epistemological foundation for the later comparative urbanism that treats cities as relational, historically situated and analytically revisable.
URBANISM MEETS ART