1st Edition

City Life from Jakarta to Dakar Movements at the Crossroads

By AbdouMaliq Simone Copyright 2010
    424 Pages
    by Routledge

    422 Pages
    by Routledge

    City Life from Jakarta to Dakar focuses on the politics incumbent to this process – an "anticipatory politics" – that encompasses a wide range of practices, calculations and economies. As such, the book is not a collection of case studies on a specific theme, not a review of developmental problems, nor does it marshal the focal cities as evidence of particular urban trends. Rather, it examines how possibilities, perhaps inherent in these cities all along, are materialized through the everyday projects of residents situated in the city and the larger world in very different ways.

    Chapter One: From the Periphery

    Chapter Two: Big cities, big projects, big problems

    Chapter Three: On anticipatory politics

    Chapter Four: Economies of interchange and speculation in Jakarta and Phnom Penh

    Chapter Five: Where Did the Cities Go?—Going beyond the periphery in West and Central Africa

    Chapter Six: Linking cities in Asia and Africa

    Chapter Seven: Virtual urbanisms

    Biography

    AbdouMaliq Simone is an urbanist and Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Since 1977 he has had many jobs in different cities across African and Southeast Asia, in the fields of education, housing, social welfare, urban development, and local government. His best known publications are In Whose Image: Political Islam and Urban Practices in the Sudan, and For the City Yet to Come: Urban Change in Four African Cities.

    "Lucid and lyrical, City Life from Jarkarta to Dakar reveals what is unknown to most of urban sociology: the globally interconnected everyday life of our cities. Simone’s compelling narratives coalesce into a brilliant new analytics for understanding how people, despite all odds, struggle to make cities their own."—Michael Goldman, Sociology and Global Studies, University of Minnesota

    "AbdouMaliq Simone is one of the most important interlocuters of contemporary urbanism. In provocative fashion, his work shows how the poetics of everyday urban life is also an extraordinary politics of resilience, speculation, and accumulation." Ananya Roy, City and Regional Planning, University of California, Berkeley

    "Simone is one of the most influential and original urban thinkers writing today. This book breaks new ground in the comparative analysis of cities in the global South raising questions that cut across both theory and practice in a variety of unexpected and imaginative ways."—Matthew Gandy, Geography, University College London

     

    "The book’s topic, originality, and ambition should make it required reading for urbanists as well as scholars of development and globalization."- Michael McQuarrie, University of California, Davis for Contemporary Sociology. 2012 41: 367