Abdoumaliq Simone
Senior Professorial Fellow at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield, U.K.
Honorary Professor of Urban Studies at the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town
AbdouMaliq Simone is Senior Professorial Fellow at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield. He works on issues of spatial composition in extended urban regions, the production of everyday life for urban majorities in the Global South, infrastructural imaginaries, collective affect, global blackness, and histories of the present for Muslim working classes. He is also a visiting professor at the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town, research associate with the Rujak Center for Urban Studies in Jakarta, and research fellow at the University of Tarumanagara. For three decades he has worked with practices of social interchange, technical arrangements, local economy, and the constitution of power relations that affect how heterogeneous African and Southeast Asian cities are lived. He has worked on remaking municipal systems, training local government personnel, designing collaborative partnerships among technicians, residents, artists, and politicians. Above all, the focus of these efforts has to been to build viable institutions capable of engaging with the complexities of life across the so-called “majority world.” His work deals with a multiplicity of propositions and capacities for relationships that remain untapped in popular districts across urban Asia and Africa, even though they are deployed everyday. This is not a matter of celebrating the informal; it is not a matter of the subaltern getting their due. This is discovering the incipient formation of new cities and urban regions in the intricate relational meshes of how things get done, a city and region that are more inclusive and which maximize the resourcefulness of their inhabitants, that suggest new ways for institutions to concretely connect with their constituents, and for the practices of residents to inform the operations of those very institutions.
Selected books
Simone, A. 2022 (forthcoming) The Surrounds: Urban Life Within and Beyond Capture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Simone, A. 2018 Improvising Lives: Afterlives of an Urban South (based on three lectures delivered at Cambridge University, November 2017). Cambridge UK: Polity.
Simone, A. 2017 New Urban Worlds: Inhabiting Dissonant Times, with Edgar Pieterse. Cambridge UK; Malden, MA: Polity.
Selected papers
Simone, A. (2020). To extend: Temporariness in a world of itineraries. Urban Studies, 57(6), 1127-1142.
Simone, A. (2020). (Non)Urban Humans: Questions for a Research Agenda (The work the urban could do). International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 44: 755-767.
Simone, A. (2019). Maximum Exposure: Making Sense in the Background of Extensive Urbanization. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, June, 026377581985635