00:00:00.000Hello and welcome to For the Wild podcast. I'm Ayanna Young. Today we are speaking with
00:00:14.120Abdumalik Simone. The governance of urban space is increasingly predicated on a kind
00:00:20.680of systematic unsettlement to keep things uncertain, eviction, extrusion. But no matter
00:00:30.220how difficult urban life becomes, there is still the endurance of these kind of middle, uncertain,
00:00:39.720vulnerable, but yet dynamic middle positions in which a sense of what we might call nationhood
00:00:47.460attempts to be built. To set up this episode, we wanted to offer some context to Abdoumalik
00:00:54.040Simone's work as a scholar, theorist, and researcher. In this episode, Simone talks us
00:00:59.980through the uncertain, vulnerable, and dynamic positions in the choreography of global cities
00:01:06.180and contemplates what it means to live an urban life. From the entanglements of resistance and
00:01:12.260protest, to surveillance and governance, to the effects of climate change on the city environment,
00:01:18.880Simone brings nuance and depth to this vital conversation. As humanity shapes the city,
00:01:25.460it shapes us in turn. And as the world rapidly urbanizes, Simone calls listeners to think about
00:01:31.860what an urban politics could be. As a researcher, Simone works on the interrelationship between
00:01:38.080urban human and non-human lives, intersecting studies in social philosophy, economy, urban
00:01:45.320technology, post-human studies, climate theory, and everyday life. During the last decade, he has
00:01:52.340worked with research and development institutions across the Global South to develop innovative
00:01:57.100programs of scholar training and research. He also focuses on issues of spatial composition
00:02:03.280and extended urban regions, the production of everyday life for urban majorities in the
00:02:07.920global South, infrastructural imaginaries, collective effect, global blackness, and
00:02:13.640histories of the present for Muslim working classes.
00:02:16.580For three decades, he has worked on the constitution of power relations that affect how heterogeneous
00:02:22.040African and Southeast Asian cities are lived, considering the practices of social interchange,
00:02:27.920technical arrangements, and local economy.
00:02:29.980He has worked on remaking municipal systems, training local government personnel, and designing collaborative partnerships among technicians, residents, artists, and politicians.
00:02:41.500Above all, the focus of these efforts has been to build viable institutions capable of engaging with the complexities of life across the so-called majority world.
00:02:51.740well abd malik thank you so much for joining us today i'm really excited to dive in thank you
00:03:05.740very much for the invitation well to begin i would really love to ground this conversation
00:03:14.040in some of the ideas your work deeply engages with so i'm wondering if you could offer a glimpse
00:03:20.760into what urbanism is and how your work intersects with questions of globalization and
00:06:20.960And while it's possible to use the same kinds of categorizations
00:06:26.840that are probably most familiar, an urban elite,
00:06:31.520the kind of upper middle class, a middle class, lower middle class,
00:06:36.340working class, the poor, as rough designations of who,
00:06:44.520of the kinds of situations that are produced by urbanization processes and also descriptive of
00:06:52.840the people who inhabit these kinds of contexts. I also have been struck for a long time at the way
00:07:03.200in which these boundaries for the majority of residents often tend to be blurred
00:07:12.560for there to be substantial intersections, both spatially in terms of everyday life
00:07:22.220amongst different groupings of people, the kinds of complementarities, the codependencies,
00:07:29.200particularly in relationship to the poor, the working class, and the lower middle class.
00:07:35.940And not only in the way in which there are proximities, spatial proximities often, between these often seen as distinct groupings, but ways in which urban economy and livelihood are often thoroughly entangled amongst them.
00:08:01.620Not that there are not different kinds of vernaculars or aspirations or ways of doing things or self-attributions, but in some way to get at the way in which urban processes and the city and its operations are largely shaped by these kinds of entanglements.
00:08:28.900And so the notion of urban majority is not so much a kind of statistical one, even though it might indeed be, but a way in which to identify what is perhaps the predominant force that composes urban space and urban economy and urban everyday life through these kinds of intersections and entanglements.
00:08:56.480and sort of referring to this as an urban majority.
00:09:02.700In one of your lectures called To Extend Temporariness in a World of Itineraries,
00:09:09.840you say, quote, I want to briefly reflect on the way in which such temporariness inhabits the urban,
00:09:16.280how it may be the urban sole inhabitant as the temporary itself seems to constantly
00:09:22.720unsettle what it means to inhabit, and how the cities and suburbs and peripheries are all kinds
00:09:29.060of strange urban formations, perhaps should not be viewed as places to inhabit, end quote.
00:09:36.280So I'd love for you to dissect this and maybe explain how does temporariness come to
00:09:42.060infect urban life across the world? Yeah, I think in several different ways.
00:09:47.900I think that in some ways in the cities that I've worked in, and particularly, again, the districts of the so-called urban majority, that the way in which they were built and built largely through what we call auto-construction, self-construction residents built not only the built environment,
00:10:14.940largely on their own, with their own labor and their own access to materials, but also built a
00:10:23.340way of inhabiting those spaces or agreeing upon the set of norms or a set of rules or a set of
00:10:33.300common understandings for what it would take to live and work together. That people were prepared
00:10:41.120to do different things at different times. For example, in Jakarta, one of the largest markets
00:10:49.920that supplies produce for all the neighborhood markets across the region is a night market.
00:10:59.680And it appears between 10 o'clock in the evening and six in the morning. And there's no trace of
00:11:07.120during the day but just before 10 o'clock all of a sudden the trucks come in the stalls appear
00:11:15.520everything is lined up organized and you have hundreds of people uh setting out their fruits
00:11:22.400and vegetables and meats and other produce and and then at six o'clock it disappears again
00:11:29.320meanwhile at four in the morning there are hundreds and hundreds of people coming and buying
00:11:33.840because they have to get the produce to their local markets when they open at 6, 6 in the morning.
00:11:42.260But what's interesting about this market is that everyone else is prepared to do everyone else's job.
00:11:50.660So the person who's driving the truck from the hinterlands with the food, those that are unloading,
00:11:57.940those that set out the tables, those that organize the stalls, those that collect the
00:12:05.560fees to clean, those that sell. All of these are prepared to do everyone else's job. So in some
00:12:13.400ways, there is this kind of institutionalized sense of temporariness so that if anything ever
00:12:20.460happens, things can be quickly re-figured, rearranged at the spur of the moment in case
00:12:28.780some new conditions appear. So there's also this kind of sense of temporariness. And then in some
00:12:36.400ways, the extensions which you refer to, the way in which now for some of the largest cities in
00:12:46.640the world, it is these extended regions where most people are living and operating. For example,
00:12:55.240Jakarta as a city has just under 10 million. The region has 37 million. And so in these
00:13:04.780hinterlands, in these extended regions, these are places of convergence for all different kinds of
00:13:15.060projects, all different kinds of money, operating in all different kinds of scales, with all
00:13:21.880different kinds of forms of land acquisition. And so there is this sense that people do things
00:13:29.880with the urgency that if they don't do them now, then things will become unaffordable,
00:13:36.520that other people will start doing things so that there is the exigency to act now.
00:13:42.040And so what happens is that many of these kinds of projects, whether they're, you know, industrial zones with factories or whether they're, you know, a small subdivision of 100 different small affordable houses or whether they be mega complexes of condominiums or internal customs ports or all different kinds of projects, many of them end up not lasting.
00:14:10.360Many of them don't really see the light of day or last for more than five years.
00:14:19.680And so there's a kind of turnover of projects, ways in which things are constantly being replaced, things that are changing hands.
00:14:27.820And now one sees in many of the large cities of the world where those districts of the urban majority that were within the urban core that are being in some ways dismantled in terms of large scale urban redevelopment projects and their residents being folded into large scale, quickly constructed condominiums that everyone knows that these buildings are not going to last more than 10, 15 years.
00:14:57.820And so there is this sense of temporariness that really permeates and is exuded in some sense by urban life. And also the sense of speeding up. What is the sense of sufficiency? What makes something viable? What makes something profitable?
00:15:19.320Already, within many cities that I work in, a kind of first generation of new office buildings that were built 20 years ago get torn down because they no longer are attractive, they no longer have very high occupancy rates.
00:15:38.520So the sense of speeding up of the exigency to act now before it's too late, or before things come unaffordable, or the shortage of available land results in the rollout of built environments that people may think eventually might work, eventually something will happen.
00:16:05.420But in terms of the present, there is no sense of a kind of long-term commitment.
00:16:14.160And also another factor is the way in which, because of traffic conditions, because of the way in which larger numbers of urban populations live now at the periphery, oftentimes longer, a long way from work.
00:16:31.960and increasingly transportation costs take up a larger share of their budget,
00:16:38.020that they will oftentimes seek temporary accommodation within the city.
00:16:46.040They'll rent a room, a hostel, maybe go back home, wherever home is on the weekend.
00:16:53.800But what this also means then is that there's a larger market
00:16:57.260for the provision of temporary accommodation.
00:17:00.540So even in some ways, the urban core becomes the kind of site of a temporariness in the sense that it houses workers and residents that are only temporary.
00:17:15.900And so you have within many districts of the urban core a residential population which is seen as, in some sense, a temporary one.
00:17:25.700They have no commitment to the territory. They're only there to sleep and to go to work. Their effective sense of affiliation is elsewhere. And this also then contributes to a sense of a kind of temporariness.
00:17:55.700In your book, The Surrounds, Urban Life Within and Beyond Capture, you explain, quote,
00:18:10.460the surrounds as, quote, urban spaces beyond control and capture that exist as a locus of
00:18:16.560rebellion and invention, end quote. And I would just love if you could further elaborate on this
00:18:22.160concept and the physicalities of structure and space that make rebellion and invention possible?
00:18:30.840I mean, I think in the book, I think the surrounds becomes much, much more of a kind of device
00:18:37.500to think about different kinds of openings, different kinds of time spaces, different kinds
00:18:49.540of practices, different kinds of tactics that don't have a kind of stable appearance or
00:18:58.720definition, but are in some ways always shape-shifting in different kinds of ways.
00:19:08.440And so in some ways, it has to do with the fact that every attempt to compartmentalize,
00:19:17.380You know, there are spaces that are clearly designated. You know, there are industrial spaces, administrative, domestic, festive, logistical, carceral, familial.
00:19:33.220But in every attempt to format and to striate and to cut and to define these as these particular kinds of spaces, there's always something that's left over.
00:19:50.620There's always something in their enactment that doesn't fall within the ambit, within the rubric of the definition.
00:19:59.820There's always a kind of remainder and always a kind of excess. And then there are spaces that are partly carceral, partly domestic, partly administrative, partly familial, but where the proportionalities, how much of it is familial, how much of it is carceral, how much of it is domestic, it's too difficult to recognize or to identify within any particular kind of calculation.
00:20:29.820Just as soon as you think you know what they are, they already move on. And the function that you've staked your analysis on is superseded by others.
00:20:40.560So in this relationship between things that are well-defined, where there's something left over, and things that have a diversity of elements that go into their composition, but it becomes difficult to tell in what proportion, that in the relationship between these two is what I might see as one manifestation of a surrounds,
00:21:07.860a kind of interstitial space, something that is either indeterminate in terms of what it's made
00:21:18.520up of, or where it seems to be determinate, that there's something left over. The question is then
00:21:27.500how do we think about these kinds of spaces? How do we think about the way in which they can be
00:21:35.300used and lived in, or maybe not inhabited at all, maybe left to their own devices in
00:21:45.360some way, as is a great deal of the urban fabric, where there are spaces where it's
00:21:53.460not clear exactly what takes place there, even if they fall under particular kinds of
00:22:00.340zoning regulations or administrations. And also the fact that in terms of the governance of the
00:22:08.020function of every space, whether it be a familial one, whether it be a public one, there are many
00:22:17.220different kinds of administrative logics that are brought to bear. And these are not seamless.
00:22:23.800They are oftentimes partial. There are oftentimes tensions and contradictions amongst them.
00:22:30.340they are seldom complete or comprehensive. And so thinking of the surrounds as always a kind of
00:22:39.700interstice, as a kind of middle space, a middle space between things that are overly defined
00:22:47.960and overly uncertain. Because in the book is that we think about the urban as a kind of
00:22:56.920locus or a domain of settlement that people settle. They find a place to try to call their
00:23:05.640own, to consolidate some kind of stability, a kind of platform from which to operate,
00:23:13.060a way to be addressed, to have an address, a way of being addressed, to settle, to have some kind
00:23:20.340of consistency, continuity. And certainly that kind of notion of settlement, human settlements,
00:23:27.580prevails. But increasingly, the administration, the governance of urban space is increasingly
00:23:39.680predicated on a kind of systematic unsettlement, to unsettle, to keep things uncertain. I mean,
00:23:49.100the urban itself is a kind of volatile space. It is, by definition, a volatile turbulent space.
00:23:56.340But instead of trying to settle that turbulence, to administer it in a way to stabilize it,
00:24:02.820increasingly the logic is, in some ways, to ride with the turbulence, to mobilize it in some way.
00:24:10.380And so part of this notion of unsettlement is manifested, of course, in the kinds of
00:24:16.580precarities and vulnerabilities that particularly the poor but other residents of the city
00:24:23.820experience in terms of their ability to find affordable sustainable places to live
00:24:32.960sustainable kinds of work but there's also in addition to this kind of forced displacement
00:24:40.960eviction, extrusion, a kind of a mode of operation which uses unsettling as the kind
00:24:51.640of normative way in which to operate within the urban. How does your work balance the theoretical
00:25:00.700with the practical realities and processes? Well, I'm not sure if it ever balances it.
00:25:08.720These are trajectories and threads that certainly are emphasized in the work, oftentimes without a kind of clear resolution or easy integration.
00:25:26.040But in some ways, what I have tried to emphasize and work with are forms of collective mobilization, if not organization, but at least collective enactments,
00:25:45.760collective, everyday life movements that exert a kind of force that don't always appear within
00:25:57.000recognizable forms, like a community association or a local government institution,
00:26:05.300that these institutions and organizations are critically important. But there's something else
00:26:14.620besides, besides in both sense of the term, right next to in something else, that in some ways are
00:26:24.220concrete, real, collective enactments that in some ways can't be read through the kind of
00:26:36.240conventional sociological languages, which is why I oftentimes refer to music and to improvisation
00:26:47.160and to choreography as a way of reading the ways in which residents, people operating within the
00:26:56.160city, come together, coordinate, align, operate collaboratively, even if it is not a kind of
00:27:06.160conscious aspiration or goal, and rather something much more implicit. So in a way,
00:27:15.480the kind of theoretical language in which I use to attempt to describe
00:27:22.560the simultaneity of many different kinds of enactments, the simultaneity of many different
00:27:30.080kinds of events and activities and livelihoods and ways of doing things, trying to discover on
00:27:38.920the ground and work with on the ground, these kind of more what might be called machinic,
00:27:46.660implicit forms of collective work that oftentimes accompany the work of institutions.
00:27:59.440So in this way, I try to explore both the kinds of theoretical elaborations on urbanization,
00:28:09.940but find some kind of way of working on the ground that some way is able to engage or at least to enable policymakers and other actors to become more aware of these kinds of forces and collective performances.
00:28:33.120gosh so much to chew on there i'm wondering how can we create and celebrate spaces of rebellion
00:28:43.080without overly romanticizing or sensationalizing these narratives yeah i mean this is this is a
00:28:53.960an important question that always is and must be asked. In my experience, it is oftentimes
00:29:03.860difficult to disentangle what are familiar acts of resistance or rebellion from a much more
00:29:15.620complicated and messy fabric of actions that certainly wouldn't count in any way as a kind
00:29:27.560of resistance or rebellion. So for example, within the sort of everyday life realities of those urban
00:29:35.620majority districts that we referred to before, that certainly there are simultaneously
00:29:46.500inordinate acts of generosity, of collaboration, of fearless refusal to accept impositions
00:30:00.380either on the part of policymakers or the police, but oftentimes entangled with very clear acts of
00:30:13.640compliance, of submission, of paraticism, of manipulation, of judgments that constrain the
00:30:23.820kind of initiatives and autonomies that people can exhibit. And in a way, there is the simultaneity
00:30:33.080of all very different kinds of practices. And it becomes a kind of back and forth, a kind of almost
00:30:41.560reciprocal process where clear initiatives of autonomy or resistance are undertaken.
00:30:49.600And then people within the same district find ways of attempting to capitalize on them or to diffuse them or to ride them for their own self-interest.
00:31:04.960And then people see this, it becomes a visible kind of enactment, and then others play off of that and say, all right, no, we will then try this particular way of fighting or circumventing or navigating or undermining.
00:31:24.300This kind of back and forth can be important because it means that in these different kinds of responses, the attempt to initiate something, others attempt to diffuse it, others are complicit with authorities to try to cut off things at the pass.
00:31:49.180It means that within that district, within that urban majority, you end up having people who have different positions in relationship to power, different kinds of networks, different kinds of statuses, different kinds of affiliations,
00:32:05.420which in the end proved to be important kinds of information for actors within that district who continue to try to do something new or to fight in a kind of different way.
00:32:20.120So I think that in some ways the attempt to ensure that one doesn't romanticize the sort of valiant struggles of the popular classes that somehow are always in the vanguard and always in some ways correct is to understand what urban politics is.
00:32:47.220And urban politics is always in some ways a kind of messy contestation and multiple forms of affiliation and relationships that are always in a sense feeling each other out, always in a process of being rearranged.
00:33:05.200And so it becomes a kind of important process through which people who inhabit that space are able to come up with different ways of doing things, different kinds of orientations.
00:33:18.200orientations. That's why I said that the surrounds is more of a kind of device for a kind of ongoing
00:33:24.480shape-shifting series of orientations and practices that may not remain the same over time
00:33:32.000and may result in rebellions that don't look like rebellions. So in some ways, I think it is a
00:33:40.520matter not of staking our analysis on resistance or rebellion in the kinds of tropes and vernaculars
00:33:49.980that we're familiar with, but to see different ways of doing things as important. And some of
00:33:56.180these kinds of desires and aspirations require different kinds of arrangements, different kinds
00:34:02.440of organizing. And therefore, there's a kind of simultaneity of things that oftentimes maybe
00:34:09.280don't easily go together. And I think that in some ways becomes the kind of perspective that
00:34:16.640is important so as not to, in some sense, romanticize and say, oh, the popular classes
00:34:24.720and the popular territories are always in this kind of process of creating new possibilities,
00:34:32.960these new demands and new victories. Yeah, I really see how the structure of
00:34:42.140temporariness contributes to rupture and change and deviation from the static continuum.
00:34:49.400Well, I have a question now on shaping the modern citizen subject, and I'm wondering how
00:34:55.860do we come to understand cities and how do city structures shape life, especially within the
00:35:02.140context of the modern nation state? Well, I mean, this has a great deal of
00:35:08.840variance across different kinds of political contexts. I mean, for example, in Cairo, in Egypt,
00:35:17.080in the last several years, you've had nearly 2 million residents upended from the places where
00:35:29.160they live and fold it into all of these new constructions at the periphery. And in part,
00:35:40.280this is a kind of reaction by the Egyptian regime, which basically predicates its existence on saying
00:35:49.440that, you know, the turmoil and the chaos of 2011 will never happen again. And so in some ways,
00:36:00.740the Egyptian state is almost about to bankrupt itself in terms of building a new capital east
00:36:11.060of Cairo, which has basically absorbed billions and billions of dollars, many of it going into
00:36:21.400the coffers of the military itself as the administrator of the construction of this
00:36:27.720new capital, and then in some ways completely eviscerating working class and poor neighborhoods
00:36:37.200and rehousing them within settlements that are very heavily surveyed,
00:36:50.060And so here clearly is the notion of trying to very concretely
00:36:55.980through a complete restructuration of Cairo
00:36:59.880attempt to create a kind of citizen, a compliant citizen,
00:37:05.480which is not then, that somehow doesn't dare then to undertake certain kinds of potentially revolutionary actions in the future.
00:37:18.040And then there are other cities that simply just leave the urban population to its own devices, where there's not even the pretense or the aspiration of using the city as a kind of engine to create a kind of citizen subject.
00:37:38.500Rather, it is simply a kind of bastion of mass pauperization, which then enables a certain kind of political elite to hold on to power without ever thinking about any kind of particular biopolitical responsibility to ensure the curation of a kind of citizenry.
00:38:02.780In ways in which, for example, with under Duterte in Manila, there was the attempt to create a kind of new citizenry through basically assaulting and dismantling the very social intimacies amongst residents that occupied much of the inner city.
00:38:25.060So there's a kind of substantial kind of dismantling underway in many instances, which in some ways attempts to enforce the compliant individual resident responsible for basically looking after themselves, doing the right thing, ensuring that they get a good education, ensuring that they constantly are being retrained.
00:38:52.000you know the classic kind of neo-liberal subject but on the other on the other hand you know it is
00:39:00.440there are so many different varying situations I mean what we just saw in in France which is a way
00:39:08.860in which the structures of internal colonialism continue to be reproduced as the mode for for
00:39:17.980governing urban areas, where you have oscillating practices on the part of the police that either
00:39:25.560act as an occupying army or simply withdraw, simply aren't present. So it's an important
00:39:33.540question, but one in some ways that is difficult to answer, because I think, you know, increasingly
00:39:41.240there is no kind of collective project in terms of trying to forge a dynamic notion of a citizenry.
00:39:54.320It's often more a kind of harsh necropolitical situation in terms of deciding who's eligible
00:40:05.120for a life that's worth living and life sustaining? How, in what ways is that to be protected
00:40:12.980through, in some ways, either actively demonizing, punishing, or undermining a large proportion
00:40:23.000of an urban population, or leaving it to its own devices through under-investing or de-vesting
00:40:33.500in terms of their social reproduction. It doesn't mean, though, again, that in the middle of these
00:40:40.660trajectories, that there isn't a very kind of dynamic, consistent way in which residents
00:40:51.720attempt in oftentimes very fractured, fragile, incomplete ways to continue to design
00:41:01.260institutional, local institutional structures and ways of collaborating that attempt to sort of
00:41:10.000offer a way of collective responsibility, of a way of caring for each other, of a way of paying
00:41:18.480attention to each other, a way of working with each other. I mean, I'm struck with no matter how
00:41:24.460difficult urban life becomes, that there is still the endurance of these kind of middle,
00:41:33.960tentative, uncertain, vulnerable, but yet dynamic middle positions in which a sense of
00:41:42.480what we might call nation time or nationhood attempts to be built.
00:42:24.440In another article that you wrote, Counting the Uncountable, Revisiting Urban Majorities,
00:42:30.280you explain that you wish to, quote, turn our speculative energies in a different direction,
00:42:35.840one that does not celebrate the resilience of the majority at the cost of their marginalization,
00:42:41.160one that recognizes actions from below that may fundamentally alter the shape of state power
00:42:47.080itself, end quote. I'd really like to focus for a moment on this distinction. So I'm wondering,
00:42:53.880how can we learn to pay proper attention to these so-called actions from below?
00:42:59.520Well, I think there are situations where, I mean, the women's movement in Argentina largely came
00:43:09.700from the ways in which neighborhoods, the difficult situations that women faced as both
00:43:18.400caretakers, workers, neighborhood stabilizers, fighting against violence, fighting against
00:43:25.740precarity, the ways in which different neighborhoods undertook different kinds of rehearsals and
00:43:32.720experiments, and then discovered each other, discovered ways that things were taking place
00:43:38.360over there, and they discovered things taking place over there. You know, over the years,
00:43:43.600the way in which these kinds of rehearsals, these kinds of experiments were able to be
00:43:49.000articulated through a national woman's movement. The way in which in Kali, the different kinds of
00:43:59.480neighborhoods under assault of police and excessive extractive taxation on their popular
00:44:06.760economic activities, basically mobilized to keep administrators and police out. And in doing so
00:44:16.440was formed by the kind of coalition on the part of different actors within these communities that
00:44:24.340never collaborated before. So, you know, women in the market and gangsters and people who were
00:44:32.600school teachers and ministers and the way in which they discovered each other as a way attempt to
00:44:42.860try to win spaces of autonomous action and protect somehow the integrity of their
00:44:49.800neighborhoods. I mean, even going back to Cairo for a moment, the revolution in 2011
00:44:59.340was itself the product of very different kinds of experiments on very neighborhood and local levels
00:45:09.140in terms of organizing popular markets, organizing collective service provision,
00:45:18.060organizing mass after-school programs on each neighborhood,
00:45:22.720the different ways in which Islamic organizations banded together across particular neighborhoods.
00:45:30.820So in some ways, it's just saying to pay attention to all of the ways, the small ways that these kinds of rehearsals,
00:45:42.220these kinds of experiments, try to not only do their thing and to consolidate themselves as an
00:45:52.700important contributor to the endurance of their territories, but also the way in which they
00:45:59.220discover each other and what that discovery looks like and the way they try to negotiate working
00:46:05.380together, oftentimes not in some kind of grand coalition, but the way they pay attention to
00:46:11.960each other, the way they share resources, the way they attempt to identify lines of connection to
00:46:19.160other things that are taking place. And oftentimes the work of so-called development funding or
00:46:27.720NGO work within cities often attempts to try to organizations claim their territory or claim
00:46:36.480their sector or claim their actors without necessarily following the lines of articulation,
00:46:44.260without following the lines of how one thing leads to another, of one kind of initiative
00:46:51.220opening onto others. And so all I was suggesting in this is that methodologically, we need the
00:46:58.900ways to sort of follow those lines and to give credence to them in some ways.
00:47:06.480Yeah. Something we touched on earlier in the conversation was surveillance. And I wanted to ask what role does surveillance play in the modern city structure? And how does an increasingly surveillance-based economy shape life?
00:47:25.120I mean, surveillance is something that operates at a planetary level. I mean, there's an exoskeleton of satellites that every space is potentially apprehendable, rendered visible, rendered trackable.
00:47:45.800And this is certainly true of much of urban life, from cities that are loaded with surveillance cameras to all kinds of tracking devices on one's phone, on the card one uses to use public transportation.
00:48:06.160In India, the capacity to receive benefits, welfare benefits, educational benefits, health benefits, is predicated on your willingness to be surveyed through the kinds of cards one is given to access these kinds of services.
00:48:27.840so urban urban life is is completely uh surrounded in many ways but what this then means is that if
00:48:40.220there is this kind of capacity to track and to monitor then the kinds of infrastructural and
00:48:50.540biopolitical investments that were made in trying to keep people put stationary in place
00:48:58.900as the grounds of urban governments becomes not necessarily jettisoned, but with the confidence
00:49:07.760that, so what happens is that you can see to the fact that people are going to be mobile,
00:49:14.780that you don't, in some sense, try to keep them in line by keeping them in place.
00:49:21.560It's like, I'll give you an example. In Sao Paulo, perhaps the largest formal employer
00:49:29.180of young Black men in the city is delivery, motorbike delivery. And what this does is that0.99
00:49:37.740in some ways, it's a very precarious job. It's very taxing. It's like you almost never leave
00:49:45.600your bike. The conditions are really terrible. You don't make that much money. But on the other
00:49:52.360hand, you talk to these, and they're mostly men, but not completely, but you talk to these
00:49:58.200young men and women. And what they will tell you is that, where is my home? Well,
00:50:06.840the entire region is my home because I know this place. I've been everywhere. I know exactly what's
00:50:14.640going on everywhere. I'm not in my barrio. I'm not in my hood. I may have to sleep there. I may not
00:50:22.580find any other place to pay rent or to have a kind of domestic life outside that hood. But I certainly
00:50:31.120don't live there. That's not the space I inhabit. I inhabit the entirety of Sao Paulo because I
00:50:38.980circulate through Sao Paulo and I know it. And I know it in my own particular way.
00:50:46.160I see the shadows. I see the idiosyncrasies. I see the things that are weakly guarded.
00:50:52.340I see the ways in which certain cameras are broken. I see certain kinds of underpasses.
00:50:58.320So in some ways, what I'm trying to suggest is, yes, there is this kind of more extensive
00:51:06.020surveillance infrastructure, but that accompanies a kind of more extensive circulation of bodies
00:51:16.000and bodies that are oftentimes had been considered ineligible to be within certain spaces.
00:51:22.220now circulating through those spaces, albeit as some of the most precarious labor,
00:51:29.960but yet have a way for themselves to valorize that in ways that say,
00:51:36.100we know this place and we know it in ways that no one else knows.
00:51:41.140Gosh, this has been such a sweeping conversation and so much detail to mull over,
00:51:48.260But I definitely want to speak just briefly about climate change within urban context before we completely close. And yeah, I'm interested in considering how viewing the climate crisis through the context of the urban majority, as you discuss it, may lead to a different view of what this crisis even means.
00:52:10.240So I'm wondering, how do we conceptualize the climate crisis, uneven impacts, and the complex realities wrought by climate change, especially in the global South?
00:52:22.340Yeah, I mean, right now, I mean, I hear every day, for example, from my friends in Karachi about how basically the city is in some ways uninhabitable through the intensity of heat and the way in which that factor of heat ramifies in all aspects of life.
00:52:47.340massive increases in domestic violence, in the way in which energy consumption becomes
00:52:56.160unaffordable. So it ramifies in all directions, substantiating vulnerabilities and precarities.
00:53:05.980So just, you know, in terms of the way in which you frame the question, that there is in some
00:53:14.240also sense that when people say we cannot live like this anymore is not just a kind of reaction
00:53:23.740to these much more intensively debilitating environmental conditions, but a way in which
00:53:31.500the very terms of the household is being reorganized, the way in which people feel that their only
00:53:40.740chance of enduring is to find different ways of sharing resources, different ways of collective
00:53:50.500management over the limited resources that they do have, the ways in which certain residents
00:53:58.960are designated as responsible for going elsewhere, to explore different kinds of positions in
00:54:06.780other parts of the country or other cities where, in some sense, local, community, neighborhood,
00:54:15.260family, household life becomes, in some sense, increasingly dispersed, reorganized,
00:54:24.200but exploratory of different ways of being together and operating in concert. Again,
00:54:32.420practices that are fraught, improvisational, experimentational, tentative, in a way in which
00:54:40.340the climactic conditions are increasingly perceived as being ameliorated only through
00:54:51.280a kind of commitment to change the way in which their voices say, the way in which we live,
00:54:59.420and that we have to do something really drastic in terms of how we value each other
00:55:06.860and the kinds of values that we prioritize.
00:55:11.480So I think in some ways there's this kind of refusal to be climate victims
00:55:17.340and a sense of a kind of radical disjuncture emerging
00:55:23.300in terms about how everyday urban life is organized within these districts.
00:55:29.420But I have to emphasize that that also takes place with a kind of intensification of the tropes of populism, of redemption.
00:55:43.160So again, it's not a clear-cut trajectory. It's a messy process.
00:55:48.820Things are conjoined in all kinds of difficult and oftentimes strange ways.
00:55:54.440but emerging from this is also a kind, I think, a commitment to materializing these disjunctures.
00:56:04.600My goodness. Well, thank you so much for this very complex and winding conversation. I can't
00:56:13.580wait to listen again and really pause and think through some of what you're bringing up because
00:56:18.800it's important. And clearly, you've put so much time and thought into this. So thank you for
00:56:24.540sharing your work with us. I really appreciate the time. Thank you for your thoughtful questions. I
00:56:31.000really appreciate having this conversation with you. Thanks for listening to For the Wild.
00:56:43.200The music in today's episode is by Jahawi.
00:56:47.560For the Wild is created by Ayanna Young, Erica Ekrem, Julia Jackson,
00:56:53.320Jackson Krupp, Jose Alejandro Rivera, and Evan Tenenbaum.