New Urban Worlds by AbdouMaliq Simone & Edgar Pieterse

Author:AbdouMaliq Simone & Edgar Pieterse
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2017-08-10T04:00:00+00:00

To use Dilip Goankar's (2014) formulation, residents of popular districts such as Lyari have been “hailed” so many times – mobilized for so many different campaigns, political ideologies and feigned emergencies – that they are no longer anchored as any clear or stable political subjects. As such, what they need to know are the highly idiosyncratic trajectories, opportunities and dangers posed by the immediate surrounds or the generalized abstractions of a more global view. Neither way of making things visible has much traction in the other. Knowledge about what exists between the very particular and very global is tentative and fragmented, reflecting the very nature of those in-between spaces. Cut off from the mediations and portals of a viable “middle,” residents figure out ways of immunizing themselves from the uncertainties of such disjuncture as well as ways of operating under the radar in order to extend themselves beyond the confines of the immediate surrounds.

For many residents, lives can unfold simply by keeping one's head down, doing what one is told, and fitting into whatever program seems to be in operation. But, for others, the sheer fact that they live in a city makes such an option intolerable, and they sometimes go to great lengths to do something very different from what they are expected to do, or even expect from themselves. The various intermixtures of such actions and choices make each city intensely peculiar; they piece together a patchwork reality from which it is difficult and dangerous to generalize. Clearly, taking everyday urbanism seriously can induce epistemic madness to the point that any hint at generalization or action that seeks to engage these thick contingencies can take on a phobic power.

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