Wayfinding in the Long Shadow of City Benchmarking: Or How to Manufacture (an Economy of) Comparability in the Global Urban

In response to Acuto et al.’s invitation to ‘take city rankings seriously’, I suggest that one strategy for doing so would be to examine what the production and reproduction of these rankings reveals about the ways in which their makers seek to govern cities across the globe. Drawing upon twenty months of ethnographic research of the global urban ‘solutions’ industry, I offer an immersive critique of what happens when city rankings ‘go wild’, frequently beyond the intentions of their makers. Often with little choice but to play by the rules of the game of global urban entrepreneurialism, the injunction for urban policy actors to subscribe to dominant logics of city rankings gives rise to—and reinforces—three tendencies of contemporary global urbanism: wayfinding, performativity, and (auto)parody. I conclude by asking what is at stake for critical urban studies and critical urban scholars when we are encouraged to engage proactively and productively with city rankings.