As part of the Global Development Institute Lecture Series Prof AbdouMaliq Simone discusses collective operations in urban settings. Despite a flood of knowledge, urban residents increasingly do not know where they are. It’s not a matter of geographical illiteracy or social confusion. Rather, the complexities of urban environments mean that a kind of darkness prevails, with residents unable to come up with a coherent working narrative for their feelings and situations. Prof Simone will explore the ways in which residents, particularly in Jakarta and Hyderabad, deal with this darkness, where countervailing realities all seem to be equally possible; where the haphazard and brazenly opportunistic expansions of built environments reaffirm or cultivate interiors of care, of people looking out for each other.

1. Global Development Institute Lecture Series
co-hosted by Manchester Urban Institute
#GDILecture
@GlobalDevInst
@UoMUrban

2. Julie Mehretu
An Urban Tissue of Endurance: collective
operations in the looming darkness

3. Kara Walker

10. Kimberly M. Becoat

13. Compression: neither the
powerful or the weak; neither
one thing or another, but a
withdrawal from distinction.
The generic is a possibility in
every imaginable form. It is
never in a direct relationship
with anything else. It declines
both affinity and distinction. As
such it cannot affix itself to
particular urban forms through
direct causality, reciprocity and
exchange. Irreducible to any
particular instrumentality.
It always shows up in “strange”
ways, turns the expected into
something recognizable but
always “off”, weird.

22. Jorge Tacla

40. Kalibata City
Photos: Rika Febriyani

64. Global Development Institute Lecture Series
co-hosted by Manchester Urban Institute
#GDILecture
@GlobalDevInst
@UoMUrban

65. The Global Development Institute
Lecture Series
Wednesday 29 November
5.00-6.30pm
Theatre A, Roscoe Building
Collective action, inequality
and development
Prof William Ferguson
Grinnell College