Tracing as comparative method

Urban scholars compare. We compare city A and city B; we compare the one to the many; and we compare historically to the present. We compare because it helps us think through similarities and differences; and we use comparison as an explicit and implicit tool that frames much of our thinking about cities (McFarlane and Robinson, 2012; Ward, 2010). But what does it mean to compare? The papers in this special issue answer this question.

In my research on comparative urbanism (Wood, 2020) and policy mobilities (Wood, 2022), I employ the concept of ‘tracing’ as both a conceptual framework and a process for comparing and connecting cities. This attention to tracing draws on Robinson’s (2016: 6) comparative approach through what she calls ‘genetic’ (by which she means ‘tracing the strongly interconnected genesis of often repeated urban phenomena’) and ‘generative’, (explained as ‘selecting cases with shared features to generate revised concepts’) tactics. In furthering a pluralistic, open-ended geographical approach to comparison, I have argued for three approaches to tracing, a terminology implicit, although rarely acknowledged, in both academic and policy research. First, a trace can refer to the large or small, inspiring or dull, similar or dissimilar components of the city. The methodological starting-point for this approach might be an architectural feature of an individual housing unit or a large-scale housing development. In a second definition, tracing encourages us to attend to the actors and their practices of copying, duplicating, or recording something from somewhere else. The actors themselves thus become the entry point through which to compare. The third definition draws attention to the pathways, conduits or routes by which aspects of urbanisation move from one place to another. For example, when we trace the origins of a policy, we do this in order to find the site of origin and its reasons for policy change. These three approaches to tracing consider that which brings cities into conversation with one another and the inherent subjectivity and slipperiness of those relations. All three definitions highlight the processual, contingent and reflexive nature of contemporary urban scholarship.

The 10 excellent papers in this special issue provide opportunities to expand and attune our thoughts on comparative urbanism in general and tracing in particular. They do so in different ways however. Although all the papers push for theoretically-informed, empirically-rigorous analysis, some are more attentive to the spatialities of the urban, including circulations and connections (Kanai and Schindler, 2022; Kipfer, 2021), while others build new insights for thinking across different contexts (Robinson et al., 2022; Teo, 2021). And, though all the papers theorise comparisons of, in and by the Global South, some also draw on historical (Kipfer, 2021; Stanek, 2021) or a posteriori (Montero and Baiocchi, 2021) approaches. Three explicitly draw on the concept of tracing –Saraiva’s (2021) study of slum upgrading in Durban and São Paulo, Kanai and Schindler’s (2022) insights into infrastructure-led development in East Africa and South America and Montero and Baiocchi’s (2021) reflections on a posteriori comparison in Bogotá and Porto Alegre. These three papers, in addition to many others in the special issue, allow us to further explore the three definitions of tracing.

Five of the papers implicitly draw on the first definition of tracing, by identifying and following a ‘thing’ that opens up possibilities for topographical and topological comparison. At the larger scale, the papers analyse the replication of urban development around the world (Haas, 2021; Kanai and Schindler, 2022; Robinson et al., 2022). These authors suggest that housing, infrastructure, and other forms of urban development travel alongside theoretical conceptualisations of global capital (Kanai and Schindler, 2022) and neoliberalism (Robinson et al., 2022), producing an ever-larger, variegated impact in each city. On a smaller scale, Niranjana (2022) recognises what she dubs the ‘minor geographies’ of Chennai and London in their infrastructural relations. Jazeel (2014: 14) reminds us that we often rely on ‘traces found in field or archival work, a scrap of speech, a tract of text, a narrative, a material thing found or alluded to by a research participant’. This methodology thus aligns with thinking on the politics of ‘fragment urbanism’ (McFarlane, 2018), which for Jazeel is ‘evidence of some other whole thing, but evidence of what exactly we can rarely be sure’. In Niranjana’s (2022) paper, she unearths the process by which the ‘fragments’ of water infrastructure – the water tankers and recycled water – instead of ‘the infrastructural whole’ serve as the entry point for comparison. This tracing approach thus moves beyond questions of scale or north–south divisions, instead recognising the many opportunities for productive comparison in both academic and policymaking circles.

Second and perhaps most commonly found in the papers, is tracing as cultivating an attention towards the practice of copying, duplicating or recording from one place to another. This second definition highlights the role of actors in pursuing tactics of tracing. Several of the papers consider the policy actors working between the Global North and Global South (Niranjana, 2022; Teo, 2021) as well as across the Global South (Kanai and Schindler, 2022; Montero and Baiocchi, 2021; Saraiva, 2021). Saraiva (2021) for instance draws on experiences, reflections and observations of policy actors working within and between eThekwini and São Paulo; while Teo (2021) considers the ‘symbiotic collaborations’ between municipal officials and their professional collaborators in Shenzhen and London; and Kanai and Schindler (2022) focus on the policy networks spearheaded by the World Bank and the G20 that are fuelling infrastructural investment. The authors underscore the politics that steer the search for comparison: for Kanai and Schindler, the geopolitical rivalries between the US and China drive these precarious capital investments; while to Saraiva overlapping networks of relations form the politics of slum upgrading in eThekwini and São Paolo. These agentful reflections contribute to broader discussions of the central role played by a multiplicity of actors and agencies in comparative processes.

Third, the papers are particularly attentive to the understanding of tracing as a pathway through which ideas, innovations and impressions flow. Whereas Niranjana (2022) considers the flows of water in Chennai and London, Saraiva (2021) uncovers the flows of knowledge; and Montero and Baiocchi (2021) discuss a posteriori comparisons in Bogotá and Porto Alegre highlighting ‘what “best practices” leave behind’. The analyses by Kipfer (2021) of Fanon’s internationalism and Stanek (2021) of Cold War comparisons also underscore the importance of historicity in comparative urbanism. This consideration for history within relational geographies draws on the following reflections by Ward (2010: 480): ‘Stressing the interconnected trajectories – how different cities are implicated in each other’s past, present and future – moves us away from searching for similarities and differences between two mutually exclusive contexts and instead towards relational comparisons that use different cities to pose questions of one another’. The papers, like this third approach to tracing, however are cautious against ‘tracing back’ to the beginnings of a project or policy. This genealogical approach might help us gain a foothold within ongoing happenings but it can also lead us down irrelevant rabbit-holes: sometimes it is difficult to isolate the exact origins of a project; other times, tracing back distracts from the analytical purchase of comparative urbanism especially when the project is overwhelmingly local. Instead, tracing the pathways exposes the methodologies of comparative urbanism, processes that are often undefined and opportune.

The positionality and the geographical locatedness of the researcher are undeniably fundamental in each of these approaches to comparison – perhaps most perceptibly in the second definition. We can imagine the researcher and their physical travels between Durban and São Paulo (Saraiva, 2021) and across continents (Kanai and Schindler, 2022) as well as their historical (Kipfer, 2021; Stanek, 2021) shifts. To varying degrees, all of the papers expose the methodology of academic research – how do we actually do comparative urbanism has been a question at the forefront of this research agenda – and their approaches provide tremendous insight. In exploring this question, several authors reveal something of the challenges, omissions, and limitations of comparative urbanism – be it the difficulties of simultaneously being here-and-there (Saraiva, 2021) or the tensions between deliberate and serendipitous research approaches (Montero and Baiocchi, 2021).

In concluding, I want to recognise that comparative urbanism in general and tracing in particular are not without limitations. In following Hart (2002: 14), ‘I am definitely not using comparison to argue for uniqueness and endless difference. Yet neither am I claiming that key differences represent locally-specific instances or variants of a more general or universal phenomenon’. What we find in the papers in this collection is an attentiveness to the specificity of the urban as well as the subjectivity of our own comparative analyses. In so doing, these interventions highlight the endless possibilities for thoughtful and productive comparisons starting from everywhere and ending up anywhere.