Jakarta, Drawing the City Near

(Paperback)

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Description

AbdouMaliq Simone illustrates how the majority of Jakarta's population, caught between intense wealth and utter poverty, handles confluence and contradictions in their everyday lives. Exploring how inhabitants from different backgrounds regard each other, how they work together or keep their distance in order to make the city endure, he offers a powerful new way of thinking about urban life

Reviews

"It is increasingly becoming clear that cities live by multiple logics and modes of existence, defying essentialist or totalizing encapsulations. Yet, the tools to get close to the living, changing, plural city remain far from adequate. In this engrossing book on Jakarta, AbdouMaliq Simone takes a giant step forward by offering a set of mid-range concepts and a writing style that uncover the structured and improvised recursions of the world's mega-cities. An essential and exciting read." Ash Amin, University of Cambridge
"AbdouMaliq Simone provides a bridge between Deleuzian techniques and ethnographic account of different places in Jakarta. Jakarta thus is not subsumed under particular theories; instead the city itself is a theory-a way of thinking, a way of living. The text itself is a city like Jakarta that offers no comfortable vantage point, but unplanned pathways that often lead, fortunately, to surprising scenes and inspiring commentaries." Abidin Kusno, University of British Columbia

Author Bio

AbdouMaliq Simone is research professor at the University of South Australia. He is the coeditor and author of several books, including Urban Africa: Changing Contours of Survival in the City and City Life from Jakarta to Dakar: Movements of the Crossroads.