A Posteriori Comparison; Repeated Instances & Urban Policy Mobilities – Jul. 20, 2022

In this talk, Sergio Montero will present a recently published article in Urban Studies on “a posteriori comparisons”, co-authored with Gianpaolo Baiocchi.

While traditional comparisons in urban studies have sought to find variation among similar cases by selecting a priori, in this article they propose to compare the findings of different researchers through a posteriori, that is, after the research has been done.

They also argue that urban researchers need to focus on urban processes rather than cities; on repeated instances rather than on controlling for difference; and on mid-level abstraction rather than on grand theory or descriptive empirical cases. They put this strategy to work by comparing empirical research previously carried out by the authors on how two Latin American cities became international urban ‘best practices’: Bogotá as a sustainable transport model and Porto Alegre as a model of local participatory budgeting.

The comparison highlights the tension between the simplified policy narratives that were mobilized to circulate Bogotá and Porto Alegre as international ‘best practices’ and the broader multi-scalar institutional reforms that these ‘best practice’ narratives have left behind in their global circulations. In doing so, they show the potential of a posteriori comparisons to analyze contemporary global urban dynamics and provide some explicit methodological tactics on how to do comparisons in a more systematic way.