二十一世纪西方“比较城市研究”进展与述评

进入21世纪以来，伴随南半球城市快速发展，以及全球尺度的区域和城市间经济、社会、政治联系的加强，全球城市化景观持续重构，展现出多元发展特征，对传统城市理论的解释范式提出了新挑战。在此背景下，西方的比较城市研究开始复兴，尤其关注南半球城市经验，探索城市理论与研究范式的转型与建构，并成为城市研究的热点。为了把握国际城市研究前沿，本文通过详细解读相关文献并结合CiteSpace引文空间分析，全面梳理了21世纪西方比较城市研究的最新进展，评述和解析比较城市研究的概念、发展进程、研究方向和理论成果。希望以此拓展国际视野，为中国城市理论建设提供参考和借鉴。

A REVIEW OF COMPARATIVE URBAN STUDY IN THE EARLIER 21ST CENTURY

Against the context of planetary urbanization, the global landscape restructuring is ongoing, especially in the Global South. This new and diverse urban landscape is beyond the explanatory power of traditional urban theories developed in the West. Accordingly, recent urban studies witness a revival and reorientation of comparative urban studies. Contemporary comparative urban study seeks to develop new epistemologies and methodologies to develop more cosmopolitan urban theories. Using the methods of text interpretation, inter-literature analysis together with CiteSpace, this paper reviews recent progress of comparative urban studies of the Anglo-Saxon world, to examine the definition and history of comparative urban study, its main research fields and recent developments. In details, we found five main research fields of contemporary comparative studies:urban theory, urban policy, urban development, urban problems and urban environment. While most coming from Anglo-Saxon countries, the number of authors in developing countries is increasing in recent five years. As a critical urban theory, contemporary comparative studies put efforts to make reorientation of urban theorization by criticizing key concepts of traditional urban theories. Firstly, the intertwining of modernity and developmentalism in urban theory has established assumptions about incommensurability of wealthier and poorer cities which are taken for granted. Comparative urban study criticizes such incommensurability of wealthier and poorer cities in terms of knowledge production for cities. Second, scale is conceived of cartographically, a fixed metric as on a map in traditional literature, which neglects the social dimensions of scale and inter-scalar dynamics. The third weakness is the ontological treatment of cities as discrete, self-enclosed and analytically separate objects. Finally, cities have to be theorized as open and relational.