Robinson’s 2022 formulation sharpens comparative urbanism into a method for conceptual production. The argument moves beyond geographically crude distinctions such as North and South toward a comparative imagination attentive to interconnectedness, dispersed urbanisation and multiple positionalities. The iconic proposition is that comparative practice can generate concepts “from anywhere” while remaining accountable to the spatial and historical conditions from which those concepts emerge. This requires abandoning comparisons designed only to classify difference or confirm pre-existing variables. Instead, cities become analytically connected through processes, relations, trajectories and unexpected resonances. The methodological operation is generative rather than adjudicative: comparison does not decide which city better fits a model; it changes the model. Its bridge to decolonial method is therefore operational. Decentring urban studies is not merely a matter of representation, but of allowing differently positioned observations and writers to intervene in the architecture of conceptualisation itself.
