Given that the unique properties of Chinese urbanisation present rich cases for an engaged pluralism in urban studies, we argue for theorising with urban China based on two methodological grounds: ‘thinking cities through elsewhere’ and conjunctural analysis. While the State encourages foreign direct investment into state-owned hotels and joint ventures, transnational remittances contribute to the commodification of Havana's private housing stock.ĭespite global academic interest, the field of urban China continues to be dominated by exceptionalist theorising. Even so, non-debt bearing assetization pressures are clearly redefining Havana's socialist property market. Nevertheless, due to endogenous and exogenous market restraints, the pandemic and complex interactions between state authorities and property-owning private entrepreneurs, Cuban-style commodification remains an incomplete and contested process.
Beyond compare alternative free#
In Havana, Cuba, the government recently legalized free market home sales, contributing to an unprecedented transnational property boom where many homes were acquired by Cuban émigrés and nationals and converted into restaurants, hotels or short-term rentals. Therefore, it is sometimes hypothesized that financial innovations created in the Global North are moving 'South.' However, even though transnational capital is finding its ways into southern regions and other areas of reform, the road towards urban commodification is bumpy and uneven.
In the Global South, cities are increasingly restructuring themselves around the financial pressures of international capital markets. While these reports are surely premature, there are risks as well as opportunities in the embrace of particularism and polycentrism in urban studies, especially if this impedes: first, the effective realization of comparative methodologies second, the theoretical interrogation of pan-urban processes and patterns, relationally understood and third, constructive dialogue across theoretical traditions, notably at the interface between political economy and postcolonialism. The provisional outcome has been interpreted as an impasse in urban theory some are even reporting its death. But in practice, the challenge of more worldly, comparative theorization has been unevenly met, often more through difference-finding and deconstructive manoeuvres than through projects of urban-theoretical renewal and reconstruction. Calls for more substantively multipolar, comparative and cosmopolitan modes of urban theory-making have been circulating for more than a decade now, and they have begun to spawn a range of alternative approaches to urban studies. Cities beyond compare?, Regional Studies.
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