Urbanisation in Comparative Perspective
To understand and grasp the multiplicity of urban realities and experiences we have to expand the vocabulary of urbanisation and develop new concepts. This poses a range of questions: How can we grasp the multitude of urbanisation processes emerging all over the planet? How can we analyse urban developments in a planetary context without neglecting the specific determinations of concrete places and experiences in everyday life? How may we conceptualise urbanisation processes that bring together a multitude of experiences in different contexts? One of the most prominent and promising strategies developed in recent years has been the mobilisation of a renewed epistemology of comparative urban research. Comparing urbanisation processes in different places offers different starting points for generating concepts which reflect a fuller range of urban experiences and thus more adequately address the development of diverse patterns and pathways of urbanisation across different contexts. Doing so makes it possible to identify underlying commonalities and logics. As a consequence, comparative urbanism has become a widely applied procedure in urban studies in recent years. But while there are many different comparative strategies that could be used to attain this goal, only few examples managed to capture both global and local dimensions to explain how general tendencies are materialized in specific places.
Christian Schmid: Patterns and Pathways of Global Urbanization: Towards Comparative Analysis (2012).
In: Josep Acebillo et al.: Globalization of Urbanity. Actar, Barcelona, 51–77.
Patterns and Pathways of Urbanisation
In 2011, the Chair of Sociology started a large project at the newly founded research centre ETH Future Cities Laboratory Singapore. Its goal was to analyse the patterns and pathways of urbanisation of very large metropolitan territories across the various divides that criss-cross our planet. Eight metropolitan territories were examined as case studies: Tokyo, Hong Kong / Shenzhen / Dongguan, Kolkata, Istanbul, Lagos, Paris, Mexico City, and Los Angeles.
The research team consisted of Naomi Hanakata, Pascal Kallenberger, Ozan Karaman, Anne Kockelkorn, Lindsay Sawyer, Christian Schmid, Monika Streule, Rob Sullivan, and Tammy Kit Ping Wong. The members of the team had a double task: On the one hand, they had to analyse vast urban areas, basically with qualitative ethnographic research and a novel method of mapping. On the other, they had to proceed with a collective comparative study of urbanisation processes.
In order to cope with these challenges, we organised regular workshops with the entire team, in which we shared our research experiences and findings from the field. We already started these comparative conversations at the very beginning of our collaborative project: in our first session in summer 2011 we shared our knowledge about the different territories based on team members’ already existing expertise. These workshops constituted the very core of our comparative procedure; they allowed each researcher to reinterpret their findings in relation to other cases, and to develop a collective and comparative understanding of urbanisation processes. During the entire duration of the project, we organised a total of 12 workshops of one to two weeks each. These workshops constituted also great opportunities to share our experiences in public discussions and conferences. These conferences show in an exemplary way the progress in our work.
Urbanisation Processes
The concept of planetary urbanisation implies the change from an analysis of territories to the study of the urban as a process. The key for this analysis was therefore not to compare cities or urban regions, but urbanisation processes. As a consequence, we did not compare individual urban territories, but urbanisation processes that we identified in the different territories and then brought them into conceptualisation. The project identified and conceptualised urbanisation processes in a new way, directly relating theory-building to empirical research. It thus applied a transductive comparative research strategy that is able to conduct a dynamic analysis of urbanisation. We started right from the outset with a theoretical basis and followed a methodological and analytical procedure driven by Lefebvre’s three-dimensional dialectics of the production of space and by the decentring and process-oriented perspective offered by the epistemology of planetary urbanisation.
In this process, we managed to identify and conceptualise a range of processes that were hitherto neglected or only poorly theorised, such as Popular Urbanisation, Plotting Urbanism, Bypass Urbanism, Multilayered Patchwork Urbanisation, Laminar Urbanisation, Mass Housing Urbanisation, and Incorporation of Urban Differences.
Planetary Urbanisation in Comparative Perspective. In: Yearbook. DARCH, ETH Zurich 2013
Popular Urbanisation. In: Yearbook. DARCH, ETH Zurich 2014
Bypass Urbanism. In: Yearbook. DARCH, ETH Zurich 2015
Towards a new vocabulary of urbanisation processes: A comparative approach (2017)
Vocabularies for an urbanising planet
After years of research and many meetings and discussions, we finally published the book Vocabularies for an Urbanising Planet, bringing together all the different elements of this ambitious comparative project. Firstly, it presents the analysis of the patterns and pathways of a range of very large extended urban regions across the world, combining a horizontal and a vertical analysis: On the one hand, it is mapping the urban configurations that could be identified in a synchronic analysis of these territories, combined with a periodisation of the urban development of these areas. Secondly, it presents a range of newly defined urbanisation processes that could be establish by a sophisticated comparative procedure. Thirdly, it brings these empirical analyses together to a decentring urban analysis, and includes reflections about a renewed urban theory, new experimental methodological approaches in mobile ethnography, qualitative mapping, a periodisation of urban development and a novel comparative procedure.
