Tokyo and London: Comparative Conceptions of the City

The city is never what we think it is: it is always far more complex and changeable than our ideas about it. Yet even ideas of the city are elusive; they are as often implicit as explicit, and it will not suffice to seek out conceptions of the city in self-consciously articulated urban ideologies alone. It is here that cross-cultural comparison provides a valuable tool, for it forces us to deeper and more fundamental levels of differentiation than do culture-bound theoretical speculations on “the city.” Comparison is first of all a means, a system of leverage for understanding our own