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City Life from Jakarta to Dakar: Movements at the Crossroads, by AbdouMaliq Simone. New York, NY: Routledge, 2010. 403pp. $31.95 paper. ISBN: 9780415993227.
AbdouMaliq Simone has a long track record of publication on cities of the Global South, their politics, their culture, and their religion. City Life from Jakarta to Dakar is, in part, a distillation of this extensive body of research (largely overlooked in American sociology), but it is also an original theoretical statement on urbanism and poverty. However, rather than being characterized by abstract reasoning based on core propositions, the book is grounded in the day-to-day practices and forms of sociability of the poor in the Global South. The result is a work that not only operates in a loosely actor-network framework, but more notably engages and extends a variety of theoretical traditions, including work on urban sociability and culture, splintered urbanism, and practical creativity. More importantly for American urbanists, Simone has developed a thesis which is orthogonal to conventional lines of debate on urban poverty here and, consequently, can contribute to a theoretical renewal in the United States as well as serve as an essential work on the cities of the Global South.
The core premise of the book is that cities are distinctive spaces of possibility. This is neither because they have jobs in large organizations, wealth, or the opportunity for mobility, nor is it because they offer the...