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AbdouMaliq Simone

This document summarizes several of AbdouMaliq Simone's current research projects focusing on urbanization and religion: 1) "Urbanizing Faith" examines how religious practices shape urban systems and social spaces, and how faith-based groups help young people secure livelihoods through improvisation. 2) Emerging forms of urban collectivity are studied in cities like Jakarta, Johannesburg, Sao Paulo, and Delhi, where new generations are articulating unexpected forms of political and social organization. 3) Research in Jakarta explores less recognized forms of association and how heterogeneous urban districts collaborate without relying on traditional affiliations.

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AbdouMaliq Simone: Current Projects Urbanizing Faith: Practices within Precarity, a multicity research program anchored at the Department of Regional and Urban Sociology Humboldt- Universit辰t zu Berlin. This conjunction of religious faith and urbanization considers: 揃 The ways in which the changing spatialization and sociability of urban life is navigated through religious practices and propositions, which serve as vehicles of contestation, consolidation, and coherence. How religious expression and organization contribute to specificities of distinct urban systems, and how they institute both social-spatial divides and improbable affiliations. 揃 The role of faith-based associations in cultivating improvisations of pathways for young people to secure life and livelihood for themselves. The conditions under which faith-based practices become urban practices, working towards the future, and how they materialize as concepts and capacities to learn how to function collectively, when the terms of affiliation are not prescribed. Here, improvisations of pathways are ways to acquire literacy in a changing urban world: for literacy to read the urban, to understand the rules of the various games played in the urban context, to adjust and adapt to new grammars, to find connections and use them for new, only emerging purposes require a mixture of faith and trust or distrust, of public familiarity, and of courage and creativity. 揃 The ways in which religious faith is expressed as an inter-mixing of different forces, capabilities, inclinations, styles, and opportunities that stretch and constrain what it is possible to do for residents of any given background or status. That no matter what formal structures, stories, powers, or institutions come to bear on what take place, no matter how they leave their mark, that there is a constant process of encountering, pushing and pulling, wheeling and dealing, caring for and undermining that tends to keep most everyone in playable to maneuver and pursue. That this intermixing is neither clearly virtuous or destructive, and entails shifting attention away from the predominance of human inhabitation as the centering node of urban development or sustainability toward ways of valuing the multiplicity of encounters possible in urban contexts. 揃 The ways in which intensive and extensive processes of urbanization at a planetary scale engender orientations to the present and future that act like faith, and where, problematically, urban living increasingly requires a faith in urbanity, in its
redemptive powers to overcome impediments of all kinds and produce new human and material capacities. Collaborative research teams investigating one or more of these themes are located in Berlin, Abidjan, Hyderabad, Jakarta, Athens, Karachi, Sydney and Melbourne. Emerging Forms of Collectivity in the Global South In spite of attempts by governments and a wide range of organizations to address the countless problems that shape urban life, many of the most pressing issues, from high levels of inequality to the messiness of everyday life in metropolitan areas, continue to be intractable and to generate deep feelings of dissatisfaction, especially among the youth. In this context, new forms of collective life are emerging that are unexpected, both inspiring and disturbing. Main protagonists of both the protests and of the new arrangements are members of a new generation of urbanites who are not migrants to the city, as their parents and grandparents were, but rather city-born. They are also part of a generation who came of age under democracy and with levels of access to information and consumption unimaginable to the previous generations. This positioning grants them a new and complex relationship with both the city and urban citizenship. The new arrangements that they create are considerably transforming the everyday, urban spaces, and politics of many cities across the south. With severl colleagues, I am working to identify and investigate these changes and the emergent politics and forms of collective life by engaging with the everyday in several cities: Jakarta, Johannesburg, Sao Paulo, and Delhi. Although powerful and widespread, the new forms of collective life are being articulated under the radar of scholars and policy makers. Identifying and studying these new urban worlds is fundamental both for the remaking of urban studies and for the formulation of effective urban and social policies. With Teresa Caldeira, University of California; Gautam Bhan, Indian Institute for Human Settlements, and Kelly Gillespie, University of the Witwatersrand. Inhabiting Jakarta What are the relationships among the more recognizable forms of associational lifee.g. civic and religious institutions, trade unions and political partiesand
less categorized forms of collective effort? Not as conceptually distinct modalities, but as entangled operations---as ways in which flat and vertical ecologies intersect. Specifically, I have been interested in considering the spatial platforms through which urban majorities in the Global South become visible and are represented. Without consistent recourse to class, ethnicity or political affiliation through which to cohere a wide range of professions and histories, how do intensely heterogeneous urban districtsbringing together various walks of life and capacitieswork out viable practices of interchange and collaboration? How do they operate in a larger world togetherin ways that do not assume a past solidity of affiliations, a specific destination nor an ultimate collective formation to come? Some specific questions of concentration include: Is territorial proximity necessarily an important condition to produce finely attuned collaboration? Does the consolidation of working relationships amongst residents require some kind of densification of everyday contact that facilitates face to face transactions? Instead of conventional governance mechanisms that act to divide, manage, and then integrate geometric designations of place, is it possible to identify and institutionalize corridors that transverse urban and regional spaces, introducing new forms of proximity and access? How do the solidities of locally-based relationships interact with larger institutions (affecting norms and regulations) in terms of producing economic growth? How do individuals manage the increased plurality of belongings theoretically accessible to them and the simultaneous circumvention of spaces of operation brought about by an intensified specification of expertise, eligibility, and niche worlds? Black Urbanism An exploration of the ways in which the long, and by no means systematic history of black inhabitation of cities could be a critical method through which to engage urban life that is more than its multiple manifestations, that exceeds any definitive attempt to pin it down, and that yet remains something specific, and not simply a potential-making machine. How does this history open up new ways of engaging the very concrete efforts that constructed the city, with all the layers of physical and cultural memory that new regimes usually attempt to cover-up, and all that the city does not show, either because its inhabitants are prohibited from paying attention or because whatever is considered normative or spectacular in city life has to get rid of the messy labor and politics that brought it about.
Current Projects

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Current Projects

  • 1. AbdouMaliq Simone: Current Projects Urbanizing Faith: Practices within Precarity, a multicity research program anchored at the Department of Regional and Urban Sociology Humboldt- Universit辰t zu Berlin. This conjunction of religious faith and urbanization considers: 揃 The ways in which the changing spatialization and sociability of urban life is navigated through religious practices and propositions, which serve as vehicles of contestation, consolidation, and coherence. How religious expression and organization contribute to specificities of distinct urban systems, and how they institute both social-spatial divides and improbable affiliations. 揃 The role of faith-based associations in cultivating improvisations of pathways for young people to secure life and livelihood for themselves. The conditions under which faith-based practices become urban practices, working towards the future, and how they materialize as concepts and capacities to learn how to function collectively, when the terms of affiliation are not prescribed. Here, improvisations of pathways are ways to acquire literacy in a changing urban world: for literacy to read the urban, to understand the rules of the various games played in the urban context, to adjust and adapt to new grammars, to find connections and use them for new, only emerging purposes require a mixture of faith and trust or distrust, of public familiarity, and of courage and creativity. 揃 The ways in which religious faith is expressed as an inter-mixing of different forces, capabilities, inclinations, styles, and opportunities that stretch and constrain what it is possible to do for residents of any given background or status. That no matter what formal structures, stories, powers, or institutions come to bear on what take place, no matter how they leave their mark, that there is a constant process of encountering, pushing and pulling, wheeling and dealing, caring for and undermining that tends to keep most everyone in playable to maneuver and pursue. That this intermixing is neither clearly virtuous or destructive, and entails shifting attention away from the predominance of human inhabitation as the centering node of urban development or sustainability toward ways of valuing the multiplicity of encounters possible in urban contexts. 揃 The ways in which intensive and extensive processes of urbanization at a planetary scale engender orientations to the present and future that act like faith, and where, problematically, urban living increasingly requires a faith in urbanity, in its
  • 2. redemptive powers to overcome impediments of all kinds and produce new human and material capacities. Collaborative research teams investigating one or more of these themes are located in Berlin, Abidjan, Hyderabad, Jakarta, Athens, Karachi, Sydney and Melbourne. Emerging Forms of Collectivity in the Global South In spite of attempts by governments and a wide range of organizations to address the countless problems that shape urban life, many of the most pressing issues, from high levels of inequality to the messiness of everyday life in metropolitan areas, continue to be intractable and to generate deep feelings of dissatisfaction, especially among the youth. In this context, new forms of collective life are emerging that are unexpected, both inspiring and disturbing. Main protagonists of both the protests and of the new arrangements are members of a new generation of urbanites who are not migrants to the city, as their parents and grandparents were, but rather city-born. They are also part of a generation who came of age under democracy and with levels of access to information and consumption unimaginable to the previous generations. This positioning grants them a new and complex relationship with both the city and urban citizenship. The new arrangements that they create are considerably transforming the everyday, urban spaces, and politics of many cities across the south. With severl colleagues, I am working to identify and investigate these changes and the emergent politics and forms of collective life by engaging with the everyday in several cities: Jakarta, Johannesburg, Sao Paulo, and Delhi. Although powerful and widespread, the new forms of collective life are being articulated under the radar of scholars and policy makers. Identifying and studying these new urban worlds is fundamental both for the remaking of urban studies and for the formulation of effective urban and social policies. With Teresa Caldeira, University of California; Gautam Bhan, Indian Institute for Human Settlements, and Kelly Gillespie, University of the Witwatersrand. Inhabiting Jakarta What are the relationships among the more recognizable forms of associational lifee.g. civic and religious institutions, trade unions and political partiesand
  • 3. less categorized forms of collective effort? Not as conceptually distinct modalities, but as entangled operations---as ways in which flat and vertical ecologies intersect. Specifically, I have been interested in considering the spatial platforms through which urban majorities in the Global South become visible and are represented. Without consistent recourse to class, ethnicity or political affiliation through which to cohere a wide range of professions and histories, how do intensely heterogeneous urban districtsbringing together various walks of life and capacitieswork out viable practices of interchange and collaboration? How do they operate in a larger world togetherin ways that do not assume a past solidity of affiliations, a specific destination nor an ultimate collective formation to come? Some specific questions of concentration include: Is territorial proximity necessarily an important condition to produce finely attuned collaboration? Does the consolidation of working relationships amongst residents require some kind of densification of everyday contact that facilitates face to face transactions? Instead of conventional governance mechanisms that act to divide, manage, and then integrate geometric designations of place, is it possible to identify and institutionalize corridors that transverse urban and regional spaces, introducing new forms of proximity and access? How do the solidities of locally-based relationships interact with larger institutions (affecting norms and regulations) in terms of producing economic growth? How do individuals manage the increased plurality of belongings theoretically accessible to them and the simultaneous circumvention of spaces of operation brought about by an intensified specification of expertise, eligibility, and niche worlds? Black Urbanism An exploration of the ways in which the long, and by no means systematic history of black inhabitation of cities could be a critical method through which to engage urban life that is more than its multiple manifestations, that exceeds any definitive attempt to pin it down, and that yet remains something specific, and not simply a potential-making machine. How does this history open up new ways of engaging the very concrete efforts that constructed the city, with all the layers of physical and cultural memory that new regimes usually attempt to cover-up, and all that the city does not show, either because its inhabitants are prohibited from paying attention or because whatever is considered normative or spectacular in city life has to get rid of the messy labor and politics that brought it about.