By Marco Allegra
“What constitutes a city, how are cities organized, what happens in them, where are they going? — in a world of cities these and many other questions invoke a comparative gesture. The budding theorist finds herself asking of the many studies she reads from different parts of the world: are these processes the same in the city I know? Are they perhaps similar but for different reasons? Or are the issues that are being considered of limited relevance to pressing issues in the contexts I am familiar with?”
(Robinson 2011: 1-2)
Comparative research is a key theoretical and methodological maneuver in social sciences. In the simplest possible definition, it means learning about something by comparing it to something else – as opposed to the simple description of a single case.
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