New Geographies of Urban Possibility

New Urban Worlds: Inhabiting Dissonant Times is cowritten by AbdouMaliq Simone, who is research professor at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Germany, and Edgar Pieterse, who is South African Research Chair in Urban Policy and director of the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town.

Combining insights from their diverse activist engagements and policy experiences in Africa and Asia, as well as decades of urban scholarship, Simone and Pieterse bring into view new horizons of urban possibility in the face of political economic inequities and the unevenly felt consequences of ecologically damaging urbanization. The authors argue that alternative futures may be discerned and nurtured from the extant life worlds of the urban majority. Much is made of the need to pay attention to the fine grain of urban lives in the global South as a means of understanding everyday practices and comings together through which ordinary urbanites negotiate the present and near future. If appreciation of such resources is thus a matter of culture (and requires the ethnographic intensity of the urban anthropologist), it is also a matter of politics in that existing ways of being, aspiring, and collaborating are bound up with distributions of power, capability, opportunity, and constraint. Similarly, according to Simone and Pieterse, any effort to extend—to build outward or scale up—alternative urban worlds must take seriously both the sociocultural dimensions of urban systems and political dissonance. The authors proffer a culturally inflected political imagination that is explicitly differentiated from both developmental blueprint futures and the apolitical consensus building of UN agencies. Perhaps more significant, Simone and Pieterse detail alternatives to the conventional politics of the Left, which they contend is suspicious of extrastate efforts to improve the lot of the poor and creative possibilities for collective action in general.

An extended preface and an introductory chapter detailing the overall intent of the book are followed by its five main chapters. These take the reader from a survey of macrolevel "scenarios" and trends (demographic, economic, ideological, infrastructural, technological, and ecological), across microlevel examination of how urban futures are negotiated and (re)made, to consideration of ways in which ground-level innovations, experimentation, and means of getting by (even in seemingly uninhabitable conditions) may be extended outward to wider domains of deliberation, strategic action, and decision making. Chapter 5 is perhaps the most important to the overall contribution of the book since this is the hinge between the maneuvering that takes place within popular urban neighborhoods and suggestions for "metaurban" reform. In chapter 6, Simone and Pieterse spell out the necessity of a commitment to experimentation—to bring formerly unthinkable possibilities into view and debate—and detail a compelling variety of more-than-academic ways in which that could be performed.

The book covers a lot of ground, but at its core are profound contributions to our understanding of the politics and spatiality of urban future making. When Simone and Pieterse argue that alternative political imaginations are already (t)here in diverse neighborhoods of cities in Asia and Africa, they are not suggesting that any specific localities or communities be taken as fully formed models to be replicated wholesale. The collaborative dynamics that can be discerned from the ground up defy the kind of fixity that is connoted by "community," while any attempt to scale up or generalize from particular lifeworlds must, according to Simone and Pieterse, be similarly attentive to the cultural politics and open-ended geographies of relationship making. The authors are more conventionally critical of technologically utopian futures (e.g., corporate-sponsored "smart cities" and probabilistic forms of algorithmic governance) and of seductive "green" futures (which all too often end up being technocratic "solutions" to exclusively middle-class anxieties). Yet in contrast to other scholars who therefore distance themselves from technocratic metrics, Simone and Pieterse see some of these as vital means for engaging...