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.
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.
"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. Simone's compelling narratives coalesce into a brilliant new analytics for understanding how people, despite all odds, struggle to make cities their own."-Michael Goldman, Sociology and Global Studies, University of Minnesota
"AbdouMaliq Simone is one of the most important interlocuters of contemporary urbanism. In provocative fashion, his work shows how the poetics of everyday urban life is also an extraordinary politics of resilience, speculation, and accumulation." Ananya Roy, City and Regional Planning, University of California, Berkeley
"Simone is one of the most influential and original urban thinkers writing today. This book breaks new ground in the comparative analysis of cities in the global South raising questions that cut across both theory and practice in a variety of unexpected and imaginative ways."-Matthew Gandy, Geography, University College London
"The book's topic, originality, and ambition should make it required reading for urbanists as well as scholars of development and globalization."- Michael McQuarrie, University of California, Davis for Contemporary Sociology. 2012 41: 367
