1. AbdouMaliq Simone: Current Projects
Urbanizing Faith: Practices within Precarity, a multicity research program
anchored at the Department of Regional and Urban Sociology Humboldt-
Universität zu Berlin. This conjunction of religious faith and urbanization
considers:
· The ways in which the changing spatialization and sociability of urban life is
navigated through religious practices and propositions, which serve as vehicles of
contestation, consolidation, and coherence. How religious expression and
organization contribute to specificities of distinct urban systems, and how they
institute both social-spatial divides and improbable affiliations.
· The role of faith-based associations in cultivating improvisations of pathways for
young people to secure life and livelihood for themselves. The conditions under
which faith-based practices become urban practices, working towards the future,
and how they materialize as concepts and capacities to learn how to function
collectively, when the terms of affiliation are not prescribed. Here, improvisations
of pathways are ways to acquire literacy in a changing urban world: for literacy to
read the urban, to understand the rules of the various games played in the urban
context, to adjust and adapt to new grammars, to find connections and use them
for new, only emerging purposes require a mixture of faith and trust or distrust,
of public familiarity, and of courage and creativity.
· The ways in which religious faith is expressed as an inter-mixing of different
forces, capabilities, inclinations, styles, and opportunities that stretch and
constrain what it is possible to do for residents of any given background or
status. That no matter what formal structures, stories, powers, or institutions
come to bear on what take place, no matter how they leave their mark, that there
is a constant process of encountering, pushing and pulling, wheeling and dealing,
caring for and undermining that tends to keep most everyone “in play”—able to
maneuver and pursue. That this intermixing is neither clearly virtuous or
destructive, and entails shifting attention away from the predominance of human
inhabitation as the centering node of urban development or sustainability toward
ways of valuing the multiplicity of encounters possible in urban contexts.
· The ways in which intensive and extensive processes of urbanization at a planetary
scale engender orientations to the present and future that act like faith, and
where, problematically, urban living increasingly requires a faith in urbanity, in its

2. redemptive powers to overcome impediments of all kinds and produce new
human and material capacities.
Collaborative research teams investigating one or more of these themes are
located in Berlin, Abidjan, Hyderabad, Jakarta, Athens, Karachi, Sydney and
Melbourne.
Emerging Forms of Collectivity in the Global South
In spite of attempts by governments and a wide range of organizations to
address the countless problems that shape urban life, many of the most pressing
issues, from high levels of inequality to the messiness of everyday life in
metropolitan areas, continue to be intractable and to generate deep feelings of
dissatisfaction, especially among the youth. In this context, new forms of
collective life are emerging that are unexpected, both inspiring and disturbing.
Main protagonists of both the protests and of the new arrangements are
members of a new generation of urbanites who are not migrants to the city, as
their parents and grandparents were, but rather “city-born.” They are also part of
a generation who came of age under democracy and with levels of access to
information and consumption unimaginable to the previous generations. This
positioning grants them a new and complex relationship with both the city and
urban citizenship. The new arrangements that they create are considerably
transforming the everyday, urban spaces, and politics of many cities across the
south. With severl colleagues, I am working to identify and investigate these
changes and the emergent politics and forms of collective life by engaging with
the everyday in several cities: Jakarta, Johannesburg, Sao Paulo, and Delhi.
Although powerful and widespread, the new forms of collective life are being
articulated under the radar of scholars and policy makers. Identifying and
studying these new urban worlds is fundamental both for the remaking of urban
studies and for the formulation of effective urban and social policies. With Teresa
Caldeira, University of California; Gautam Bhan, Indian Institute for Human
Settlements, and Kelly Gillespie, University of the Witwatersrand.
Inhabiting Jakarta
What are the relationships among the more recognizable forms of associational
life—e.g. civic and religious institutions, trade unions and political parties—and

3. less categorized forms of collective effort? Not as conceptually distinct
modalities, but as entangled operations---as ways in which flat and vertical
ecologies intersect. Specifically, I have been interested in considering the spatial
platforms through which urban “majorities” in the Global South become visible
and are represented. Without consistent recourse to class, ethnicity or political
affiliation through which to cohere a wide range of professions and histories, how
do intensely heterogeneous urban districts—bringing together various walks of
life and capacities—work out viable practices of interchange and collaboration?
How do they operate in a larger world together—in ways that do not assume a
past solidity of affiliations, a specific destination nor an ultimate collective
formation to come?
Some specific questions of concentration include: Is territorial proximity
necessarily an important condition to produce finely attuned collaboration? Does
the consolidation of working relationships amongst residents require some kind
of densification of everyday contact that facilitates face to face transactions?
Instead of conventional governance mechanisms that act to divide, manage, and
then integrate geometric designations of place, is it possible to identify and
institutionalize “corridors” that transverse urban and regional spaces, introducing
new forms of proximity and access? How do the solidities of locally-based
relationships interact with larger institutions (affecting norms and regulations) in
terms of producing economic growth? How do individuals manage the increased
plurality of belongings theoretically accessible to them and the simultaneous
circumvention of spaces of operation brought about by an intensified
specification of expertise, eligibility, and niche worlds?
Black Urbanism
An exploration of the ways in which the long, and by no means systematic history
of black inhabitation of cities could be a critical method through which to engage
urban life that is more than its multiple manifestations, that exceeds any
definitive attempt to pin it down, and that yet remains something specific, and
not simply a potential-making machine. How does this history open up new ways
of engaging the very concrete efforts that constructed the city, with all the layers
of physical and cultural memory that new regimes usually attempt to cover-up,
and all that the city does not show, either because its inhabitants are prohibited
from paying attention or because whatever is considered normative or
spectacular in city life has to get rid of the messy labor and politics that brought
it about.