URBANIZING POLITICAL ANALYSIS

Thinking through the urban is a useful heuristic for interrogating the growing significance of cities globally and for exploring a set of essential formations underlying contemporary social and spatial development. Most directly, urbanizing political and policy analysis involves paying attention to cities that have long been relegated to the margins of the discipline. Even more important, however, it entails decentering the nation-state from foundational theories, concepts, and approaches.

Drawing on the pioneering work of sociologist Louis Wirth—for whom the population size, population density, and demographic diversity of twentieth-century cities signaled a distinctive social formation—scholars have recently called for the development of distinctively urban tools of political analysis. From celebrity policy “gurus” including Richard Florida and Benjamin Barber, to American politics visionaries such as Clarence Stone, to political theorists such as Warren Magnusson, these authors have questioned the practice of applying national lenses to understand the global urban condition. Indeed, this diverse group effectively demonstrates how attention to urban political processes (i.e., where cities are understood to be the basic units of political life) entails a set of disciplinary practices and optics that radically challenges the status quo.

A key target of their criticism is the entrenched statism of political science with its emphasis on discrete territories, nested federal institutions, fixed political entities, formal authorities, and sovereign power (Boudreau Reference Boudreau2016; Magnusson Reference Magnusson2011). Like Wirth’s intervention to redefine the social, urban scholars today thus assert an imperative to view politics differently. Size, density, and diversity continue to define urbanism; however, in addition to this classic triad, there are several important and interrelated features distinctive to the contemporary urban age. Notably, cities today are dynamic, global, and contingent. Against the static map of world politics, the urban condition is best understood as a set of multidimensional and uneven processes. Moreover, unlike the supposedly predictable play of nation-states, urban politics is full of experiments, regulatory logics, political formations, and institutional assemblages that undermine any simple trajectories or linear causations. The processes comprising cities consist of flows, relationships, and interdependencies defined by irreducibly complex global–local engagements.

An urban planet thus requires more mobile, dialectical, and unpredictable analyses than a world of nation-states. Magnusson (Reference Magnusson2011) used the phrase “seeing like a city” to capture the type of vision required to understand urban political formations today. “To see like a city,” Magnusson wrote (2011, 10), “is to recognize that the static order we so often associate with the state is an illusion… We have to attune ourselves to deep uncertainty just as we do in a strange city whose ways are unknown to us.” This provocative invitation to suspend our disbelief and to pay attention to a multiplicity of political authorities acting in concert opens up many generative venues for inquiry. To see like a city does not merely replace one type of polity (the state) with another (the city); rather, it seeks to escape statist blinders in order to rethink the fundamentals of political existence anywhere and what Boudreau (2016, 12) called distinctively urban “logics of action.”

In the face of the decisive and comprehensive challenges of the urban age, political science in general remains sclerotic. This failure to respond is troubling both analytically and practically. On the one hand, by ignoring the multiple entanglements that define the urban world, we miss basic operations of contemporary power, sovereignty, democracy, citizenship, subjectivity, and belonging. On the other hand, in producing knowledge that continues to emphasize the primacy of the sovereign nation-state, we actively contribute to the dysfunctional operations of statist public policy and governance—failings that are most visible in pressing cross-border challenges such as mass migration, apocalyptic climate change, gross inequality, and widespread popular unrest.^{Footnote 2}

COMPARISON IN AN URBAN WORLD

With its broad field of vision and concern for cross-context patterns, comparative politics is a promising platform from which to cultivate an urban political imagination. Although work on municipal activities is by no means the privileged point of entry to the political today, the study of cities has long lent itself to integrative scholarship that is attuned to complexity and indeterminacy. Indeed, historical reflexive political science scholarship about comparative urban research (Keating Reference Keating1991; Pickvance Reference Pickvance1986; Walton Reference Walton, Logan and Todd1990) provides a good foundation for this endeavor. Taken alongside recent interdisciplinary debates over the value and limits of global urbanisms (Jacobs Reference Jacobs2012; Jazeel Reference Jazeel2019; Nijman Reference Nijman2007; Peck Reference Peck2015; Robinson Reference Robinson2016; Roy Reference Roy2011; Sheppard, Leitner, and Maringanti Reference Sheppard, Leitner and Maringanti2013), this work can help us determine how the comparative project might fit into the agenda of urbanizing political and policy work more broadly. Through this dialogue, we can reflect on and interrogate what type of comparative strategies are appropriate to the contemporary moment as well as the analytical, methodological, and political effects of these choices (see also Hart Reference Hart2018).

There is much to value in recent research on comparative urban politics. This literature has been a welcome corrective to the national-level focus of much comparative work, documenting that sovereign authority is not absolute and that power operates through a range of formal and informal authorities operating at multiple overlapping scales (e.g., Brenner Reference Brenner2004; Davis and Tajbakhsh Reference Davis and Tajbakhsh2005; DiGaetano and Strom Reference DiGaetano and Strom2003; Good Reference Good2014; Pierre Reference Pierre2011; Savitch and Kantor Reference Savitch and Kantor2002; Sellers Reference Sellers2002; Sidney Reference Sidney2014; Stren Reference Stren, Stren and McCarney2003; Weaver Reference Weaver2015). Recent comparative urban scholarship, at least partially, also has challenged the Euro–American focus of the discipline. A new phase of cosmopolitan urban research—found in the Comparative Urban Politics section of APSA and in Urban Affairs Review—has been important for elaborating new subjects beyond the formal governing elites of the global north and for highlighting a variety of geographic sites typically “left off the map” (Robinson Reference Robinson2002). This work thus has enabled a much deeper and more nuanced depiction of contemporary urban governance, policy making, institutional formation, norms construction, collective struggles, and practices of everyday life.

Yet, the conventional comparative approach—itself a legacy of statist thinking—nevertheless suffers from pitfalls that come into stark relief in an urban perspective. Foremost among these is the way in which comparison continues to function as an imperial apparatus for apprehending and ordering otherness, thereby reproducing a hierarchical political order. Postcolonial scholars have long demonstrated that comparative political science in the West has been a means for dividing the world into component parts, erasing the constitutive links between these bounded units, coding differences vertically, and naturalizing this organization of the world as a means of domination. In urban politics, the most obvious example of these maneuvers is in the global-city ideal and the developmentalist metrics of global-city rankings. However, this type of thinking pervades universal claims embedded in the nomothetic project of much comparative analysis. Abiding an urban perspective, any work of comparison must come to terms with the imperial implications of generalized theories as well as the extreme geographic asymmetries of power-knowledge that undergird academic production today.

In addition, to truly “see like a city,” comparative scholars should continue to question their use of space, scale, and causality (Ward Reference Ward2010) in explaining political phenomena. The topographical assumptions of “case studies” are a poor fit for topological operations of power (Allen Reference Allen2016). Comparing cities through their national contexts (DiGaetaeno and Strom Reference DiGaetano and Strom2003; Savitch and Kantor Reference Savitch and Kantor2002), for example, misses the fundamental embeddedness of cities in multiple global networks as well as the relationships between and among different sites. Similarly, the dogged drive to make comparison a rigorous scientific exercise (Pierre Reference Pierre2005), in which complexity is sacrificed to parsimony, also requires assumptions that are untenable through an urban lens. The premise that discrete and closed objects called cities exist and that these are equivalent across cases; the reduction of many power relations into vertically nested “levels” of institutional authority; and the positivist belief in the self-explanatory nature of apparent phenomenon all contravene the urban vision proposed by scholars including Magnusson and Boudreau.

Comparative politics is undoubtedly useful in urbanizing political and policy analysis, but we also must move beyond such a framework and critically reflect on its founding assumptions. The questions that arise in urbanizing comparative analysis are not insignificant. What exactly is being compared? How might we move beyond methodological localism to understand urban activities that stretch beyond any administrative or cartographic borders? In a world of competing and overlapping authorities—including, of course, the nation-state—how do we determine the relevant forces shaping urban outcomes in context? How do we balance the need to pay close attention to historical and geographical particularity while also identifying common generative structures? Is the observation of empirical phenomena in cities sufficient? What type of abstractions will not disfigure the objects they describe?

Full consideration of these concerns is beyond the scope of this commentary, but three directions for comparative research appear particularly generative. First, to urbanize political and policy analysis in Magnusson’s sense, we should seek conjunctural accounts that understand cities as formed by extensive interactions (Söderström Reference Söderström2014; Ward Reference Ward2010). In considering the ongoing dialogic connection between sites and cases, a more relational comparison also would explicitly problematize the relative positioning of cities in the context of uneven development and multiscalar relations (Peck Reference Peck2017; Sheppard, Leitner, and Maringanti Reference Sheppard, Leitner and Maringanti2013). In addition to working laterally across supposedly isolated national contexts, this type of comparison would illuminate how places, policies, laws, conflicts, institutions, and norms are constituted with one another through power-laden practices. Through this, we thus might better understand the micropolitics that creates, makes durable, and undermines urban political orders. Debates on policy mobilities (McCann and Ward Reference McCann and Ward2011) and intercity policy networks (Acuto Reference Acuto2013) describe the promises of this type of work.

Second, comparison should not be taken for granted as a neutral methodology but rather should itself become an object of analysis occasioned by the urban problematic. On the one hand, comparison is a driving force of urbanization and a tool of contemporary governance. Unpacking how urban stakeholders render the world comparable and operationalize comparison through, for example, laws (Hirschl Reference Hirschl2014), para-diplomatic relations (Stren and Friendly Reference Stren and Friendly2019), and mobilization practices (Boudreau, Boucher, and Liguori Reference Boudreau, Boucher and Liguori2009) are promising guides in this endeavor. On the other hand, comparison produces knowledge within existing circuits of power. Continued reflection on the ethics of the comparative method and the role of political science in colonial relations is necessary to overcome historical harms of comparison and to develop a political imagination that is not limited by discrete territoriality. Theorizing extended and differentiated processes without contortion poses a formidable challenge for thinking across time and space. The possibility of what Jazeel (2019, 5) called “incomparable singularities” also suggests limits to trans-historical and trans-spatial thinking.

Third, to grasp the full weight of contemporary global transformations, comparison alone is insufficient. We also must build new theories, lexicons, and other representational apparatuses to capture the varied and constantly shifting ground of urban politics. Given the lag between emerging events and inherited tools of analysis, “seeing like a city” entails ongoing theoretical renewal. Here, too, there are useful guides that combine holistic empirical description with concrete abstractions, “spiraling up and down through cases and contexts” (Peck Reference Peck2017, 9). Recent urban scholarship on “the political” (Enright and Rossi Reference Enright and Rossi2017; Swyngedouw Reference Swyngedouw2018) and citizenship (Isin Reference Isin2012) constructs provisional theories from real urban conditions. Comparison in this conceptual work is not in the service of typology but rather is used as an “interrogative technique” (Roy Reference Roy2003, 466) to explore what can be gained in thinking one place with another. In this practice, it is especially important to include the global south, where urbanization is happening most rapidly and intensely.