Janet Abu-Lughod: cities, the world system and comparison

Janet Abu-Lughod's comparative urban sociology is a method for studying cities on different continents without measuring them all against the European or American city. Abu-Lughod, an American sociologist who taught at Northwestern University and at the New School in New York and died in 2013, devoted her career to a question the world map conceals: why some cities appear at the centre of urban history and others at its margins, and whether that distribution describes reality or only the place from which the history was written.

A world system before European hegemony

Her most influential book, Before European Hegemony (1989), argues that between 1250 and 1350 a world trading system already existed, made up of eight linked circuits running from Bruges and Genoa to Cairo, Baghdad, Samarkand, India, the Strait of Malacca and China. Europe was then a peripheral region of that system, not its centre. The thesis dismantles the idea that the world economy was born with European expansion in the sixteenth century, and explains Europe's later rise by the crisis of the other centres, beginning with the Black Death, rather than by any superiority of its own.

Cairo and Rabat, studied from the inside

Before that book, Abu-Lughod had written Cairo: 1001 Years of the City Victorious (1971), a history that does not treat the city as an incomplete version of Paris or London but as a metropolis with its own thousand-year logic: the medieval city, the Mamluk city, the colonial city and the city of twentieth-century rural migration, coexisting on the same map. Her method combined historical archives, census statistics and fieldwork, a mixture unusual in American sociology at the time.

Rabat: Urban Apartheid in Morocco (1980) is her harshest study. It shows how the French colonial administration under Marshal Lyautey deliberately separated the medina from the European new town, with different building rules and an empty strip between the two, and justified it as respect for heritage. Abu-Lughod called the result urban apartheid and showed that independence did not undo it: physical separation turned into class separation and went on deciding who lived where decades later.

New York, Chicago and Los Angeles compared

In New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America's Global Cities (1999) she applied the same method to her own country. Against those who presented the global city as a single model, she compared three metropolises that globalised along very different paths, shaped by their geography, the moment of their growth and their racial history. Race, Space, and Riots (2007) compared the major urban uprisings in those three cities and showed that segregation produces conflict in different ways depending on how each territory is organised.

The usual objection to world-system approaches is that they explain too much: if everything is connected to everything, any local event looks like the consequence of distant forces. Abu-Lughod avoided that risk with a practical rule that remains useful. First identify the ties of trade, power and migration that run through a city; then study how they take shape in a specific local history; only then compare. Connecting cities, in her work, never means turning them into copies of one another or ranking them from more to less advanced.

Her influence runs through the urban studies that now call for theorising from the Global South, such as the work of Jennifer Robinson and Ananya Roy. And the question she left open still applies to any ranking of cities: who decides which city is the centre, with what data, and from where the map is being read.