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

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.