Robinson’s 2022 introduction recasts comparative method for an urban world whose spatialities are dispersed, networked and internally differentiated. The paper rejects both conventional case matching and geopolitically crude binaries, including an undifferentiated category of “southern urbanism”, in favour of comparisons that work with multiple elsewheres and interconnected urban processes. Its iconic idea is that comparison is itself a mode of concept generation. Rather than testing fixed theories against selected cases, comparative practice can produce, stretch or abandon concepts as divergent urban situations enter conversation. The theoretical contribution is a mobile and experimental understanding of the urban, while the methodological operation lies in reformulating cases, comparators and spatial relations so that research can begin from any context. The paper bridges comparative sociology, postcolonial urban theory and methodological innovation, and it makes an especially strong argument that the spatial structure of global urbanisation should determine the architecture of comparison rather than inherited disciplinary conventions.