Robinson frames global urban theory as a problem of conceptual authority. Postcolonial critiques have expanded the geography of urban studies, yet the question remains whose cities and whose scholars are permitted to generate concepts rather than merely supply cases. Her argument turns comparative urbanism into a theory-making practice capable of building concepts across difference without erasing located specificity. The iconic idea is a “world of cities” in which any urban settlement can become a legitimate starting point for theorisation. Methodologically, comparison is detached from rigid case-control designs and treated as an experimental practice of relating distinctive trajectories, processes and positionalities. The bridge to epistemology is direct: comparison becomes a means of redistributing conceptual power. A more global urbanism is not achieved by adding geographically diverse examples to an unchanged theoretical canon, but by changing the procedures through which observations become abstractions and abstractions remain revisable by encounters elsewhere.
