Abdoumaliq Simone: 6 books

Jakarta, a city rife with disparities like many cities in the Global South, is undergoing rapid change. Alongside its megastructures, high-rise residential buildings, and franchised convenience stores, Jakarta’s massive slums and off-hour street markets foster an unsettled urban population surviving...

Among government officials, urban planners, and development workers, Africa’s burgeoning metropolises are frequently understood as failed cities, unable to provide even basic services. Whatever resourcefulness does exist is regarded as only temporary compensation for fundamental failure. In For...

It is well known that the world is transitioning to an irrevocable urban future whose epicentre has moved into the cities of Asia and Africa. What is less clear is how this will be managed and deployed as a multi-polar world system is being born. The full implications of this challenge cry out to...

Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis is a pioneering effort to insert South Africa’s largest city into urban theory, on its own terms. Johannesburg is Africa’s premier metropolis. Yet theories of urbanization have cast it as an emblem of irresolvable crisis, the spatial embodiment of unequal economic...

The poor and working people in cities of the South find themselves in urban spaces that are conventionally construed as places to reside or inhabit. But what if we thought of popular districts in more expansive ways that capture what really goes on within them? In such cities, popular districts are...

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...