Jakarta: Drawing the City Near by AbdouMaliq Simone PDF

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Book Review: Jakarta: Drawing the City Near, AbdouMaliq Simone, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2014, 319 pp, $27 (paperback), ISBN 978081669 3351 Jonathan Silver, Urban Institute, University of Sheffield Jakarta: Drawing the City Near makes a significant contribution to urban studies part...

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Book Review: Jakarta: Drawing the City Near, AbdouMaliq Simone, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2014, 319 pp, $27 (paperback), ISBN 978081669 3351 Jonathan Silver, Urban Institute, University of Sheffield Jakarta: Drawing the City Near makes a significant contribution to urban studies particularly in how we understand the everyday rhythms, networks and unfolding conflicts of global urbanism. As the world’s majority shift to the popular neighbourhoods of cities across the South there is still much for researchers to grasp hold of in terms of how processes of city building are unfolding, out of both longer histories and more ordinary and immediate moments of urbanisation. In this sometimes confounding yet always challenging book, AbdouMalique Simone covers a series of provocations based on his observations in Jakarta since 2006 that also draw on his longer history of research across African cities. As the reader crosses contemporary Jakarta and hears from some of its ever-growing 10 million inhabitants, Simone develops novel ways to grasp hold of the contours and topographies of urban life still so little explored in debates about the urban. Through the streets, people and politics that make up this dizzying metropolis, the reader is brought into proximity to the unfolding, multiple and often contradictory trajectories of urbanisation in the global South. To examine and explore the shifting urbanisms of cities such as Jakarta, Simone deploys new conceptual vocabularies and underlying ethnographic study that reveal the textures, surfaces, connections and making of everyday life in ways that help us diverge from a linear, Euro-American narrative of urban experience (Roy, 2009). This ability to narrate these urban geographies has been visible across much of Simone’s (2004; 2010; 2013) work as he mobilises a rich tapestry of description, analysis and experimentation. Yet these at times 1

dense articulations, concerned with knowing the city and generated throughout the book, may leave the reader struggling to keep up with the pace at which Simone travels across and responds to the urban worlds of Jakarta. There are, however, some particular moments in the book that stand out in terms of important new ideas about global urbanism. Perhaps the key orientation of Drawing the City Near is based around how residents live with the multiple and oscillating uncertainty of twenty-first-century urban life in a metropolis (Zeiderman et al., 2015). This is a theme that Simone (2013) has explored in earlier work in Jakarta and returned to in more detail in the book. At the heart of the writing is a mirroring between the often uncertain ‘speculations’ of urban dwellers navigating the topographies of Jakarta, the ‘uncertain political atmosphere’ (14) that pervades the city and Simone’s own speculative praxis that produces his ‘inventive concepts’ (4). This focus on uncertainty unfolds through the everyday engagements with the city that make Simone’s theoretical– methodological orientation so relevant to how we undertake research on cities. He goes on to draw out the governance that ‘left urban regions with large amounts of uncertainty’ (165), showing that expectations and understandings of linear, modernist notions of urban development come up short across Jakarta’s dense heterogeneous spaces and leave the ‘urban majority’ to generate strategies for survival and empowerment. Simone has perhaps unfairly been characterised as focusing on the everyday nature of global urbanisms across the South without covering more than points of connection with shifts in urban political economy. While Drawing the City Near is not meant as a systemic analysis, Simone covers some interesting thoughts on the intersections between political economy and the everyday that are normally constructed into an unhelpful binary across academic literatures. Othering the ‘device’ of the ‘Near-South’ to understand Jakarta and similar urban regions such as Karachi and Mexico city, Simone nds a way to bring these terms into constructive conversation. He asserts that ‘we cannot really say that these things – planetary urbanization and a local city reality – are two different things’ (163). Indeed, throughout the book the shifting of the author’s gaze from new shopping and residential developments through to the courtyards of traditional neighbourhoods provides a powerful articulation of the convergences (and divergences) of political economy and everyday life.

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If Simone navigates the tensions between understanding Jakarta as a globally produced space of capital and a locally made space of everyday urbanism, then there are also moments when tension clearly becomes useful in helping to elucidate the ways this metropolis is transforming. The book success- fully conveys a series of frictions present throughout the city that bring Simone’s encounters to life. This is between the street life and the private inside, between an (often brash) sense of Western modernity and the (reshaping) traditions of Islam, and between the extreme wealth and poverty (and the ‘urban majority’ in between) that make up Jakarta’s ever-growing population. Finally, while possibility is explored in all its forms in the book, the contours of radical possibility or the radical transformation of people’s lives and the city itself can sometimes feel obscured as the reader becomes entwined in the dense descriptions of getting by and getting on in Jakarta. Simone offers the reader an important reflection, though, that opens up a new vista of struggle and contestation. He argues that we need ‘a sense of what cities still might be aiming for – that is, a sense of vitality based on the elaboration of spaces and practices able to make the most of the differences and resources with which they have contact’ (267). It is this opening of possibility for urban dwellers, as they (re)shape Jakarta’s often unequal landscapes through everyday acts of resistance, community building, networking across neighbourhoods, trading, religious practice and widespread generosity, that help to make this intervention such an important study for those looking for the questions, let alone answers, to the urban futures of the global South. References Roy, A. (2009) ‘The twenty- rst-century metropolis: new geographies of theory’, Regional Studies, 43(6), 819–30. Simone, A. M. (2004). ‘People as infrastruc- ture: intersecting fragments in Johannes- burg’, Public Culture, 16(3), 407–29. Simone, A. M. (2010) City life from Jakarta to Dakar: movements at the crossroads, London, Routledge.

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Simone, A. M. (2013) ‘cities of uncertainty: Jakarta, the urban majority, and inventive political technologies’, Theory, Culture & Society, 30(7), 243–63. Zeiderman, A., Kaker, S. A., Silver, J., and Wood, A. (2015) ‘Uncertainty and urban life’, Public Culture, 27(2-76), 281–304.

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