These art spaces in Beijing and Berlin show the complexity of studying place-making while constantly attuned to the ever-present elsewhere. Entwined ideas of imagination and anticipation suggest a particular form of aspiration at play. These art spaces reflect the power to see possibility and to imagine alternatives, a mix of survival and opportunism rendering aspiration as something beyond hope – it reflects their ‘capacity to aspire’ (Appadurai, 2004).

This final chapter explores the theoretical consequences from this comparative study of art spaces. First, it considers the nature of grounded theory or theorizing back, and the function of comparison based on the preceding findings. It notes some of the limitations to comparison, and to the present research, outlining the shortcomings of a ‘lone scholar’ (Peck, 2017) approach to (comparative) research. Second, it develops a working definition for spaces of possibility, building on the politics of the possible (Madison, 2003; Simone, 2008, Simone, 2011; Amoore, 2013), applicable to the experience of making these art spaces. In a context of inevitabilities, art spaces reflect modes of adaptation and alternative practice. Finally, it suggests how a concept of aspiration can serve to better connect the function of imagined futures, hopes and fears in the exercise of present-day everyday life. With Robinson's call for a more global urban studies, this comparative study re-inscribes the ways that cities are constantly shaped by the presence of an elsewhere, and the role of aspiration in navigating what could be.

Theorizing gestures

The selected mode of theorizing back borrows from grounded theory, which develops theoretical concepts sourced in data rather than deducing hypotheses from existing theories (Glaeser and Strauss, 1967; Ward, 2009). Having built the empirical chapters on thematic clusters structured broadly around conceptual motivations, practices and spatiotemporal expressions, this chapter further considers broader theoretical implications from the empirical experience of these art spaces. In doing so, it also borrows from anthropological traditions locating theory in a space ‘below high abstraction to hover over actual human projects and goals unfolding in myriad circumstances of possibility and contingency’ (Ong and Collier, 2005; Ong, 2011: 12).