City Life from Jakarta to Dakar: Movements at the Crossroads [Paperback]

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.

By showing how much of what is considered peripheral to urban life is actually critical to it, the book opens up new ways for understanding what it is possible to do in cities from now on.

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. Simones compelling narratives coalesce into a brilliant new analytics for understanding how people, despite all odds, struggle to lÃT