Relational Multiscalar Analysis: A Comparative Approach to Migrants within City-Making Processes

Abstract

To contribute to the growing literature on comparative urban research, this article speaks to the theoretical and methodological challenges that underlie recent calls for comparative relational approaches to city-making. The relational comparative analysis we develop highlights the multiscalar transformations of relations of power across time and space, which reconstitute urban life within changing historical conjunctures. The article offers a working vocabulary for a relational comparative approach, together with methodological illustrations drawn from our research on three seemingly very different disempowered cities located in Germany, the United States, and Turkey. This methodology includes identification of comparative parameters. These parameters enabled exploration of the similar and different dynamics and paradoxes of interrelated key processes in the three cities. Such comparative dimensions might prove useful in future work on disempowered cities. Our multiscalar approach enabled us to explore the ways in which migrants and non-migrants can be understood as actors reconstituting the city within the conjunctural transformations brought about by neoliberal urban regeneration.