AbdouMaliq Simone has been a seminal contributor in the effort to produce a reflection on what has come to be called ‘Southern Urbanism’ – the idea that we can and should talk about cities, urban theory and urbanization from the Global South. His work focuses on various powers, cultural expressions, governance and planning discourses, spaces and times in cities across the world. His current project includes “Urbanizing Faith: Practices within Precarity,” which studies how religious expression and organization contribute to specificities of distinct urban systems, and how they institute social-spatial divides. He is also researching “Emerging Forms of Collectivity in the Global South”, looking at the new forms of collective life emerging in the midst of inequality and messiness of urban life that can generate deep feelings of dissatisfaction, especially among the youth.
Prof Simone is currently research professor at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity and visiting professor of sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and visiting professor at the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town, Research Associate with the Rujak Center for Urban Studies in Jakarta, and Research Fellow at the University of Tarumanagara. His key publications include: Jakarta, Drawing the City Near (Minnesota, 2014), City Life from Jakarta to Dakar: Movements at the Crossroads (Routledge, 2009), For the City Yet to Come: Changing Urban Life in Four African Cities (Duke University Press, 2004), and In Whose Image? Political Islam and Urban Practices in Sudan (University of Chicago Press, 1994).