Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Rita Padawangi, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

Throughout a long career working in African and Southeast Asian cities, I return to reflections of my initial involvement in urban issues, rooted in the black struggles of the 1960’s and 1970’s, to render black experiments in cities a critical component of the contemporary focus on planetary urbanism.

In today’s uncertain urban conditions it is not easy to determine what cities are, let alone predict where they are headed. In the profusion of quick turn-overs, underemployment, demographic shifts, urban management by algorithm, and the contiguity of standardized spectacular and the low-grade built environments, the city carries too many expectations for what it can actually deliver. It is no wonder then that the prevalent mood in terms of theorizing cities and urbanization is to restore some common sense, to get to the heart of critical matters in a world where urbanization disrupts once normative assumptions about the nature of territory, scale, and politics.

But such common sense continues to dismiss the role that the subjugation of black peoples played in constituting the prevailing norms of urban super-modernity and all that was nearly and theoretically possible in black resistance to this role. While resistance may come in all complexions and ethnicities, the struggles of keeping different angles open fall largely to a city’s black inhabitants. For the lengths they were forced to travel across different sites of capture meant the acquisition of an intricate toolbox of escapes and endurance. Where the lines of making history were not open, where the accumulation of the orienting and legitimating stories of genealogy were cut off, the use of the city as a place and resource for many viable forms of living necessitated all kinds of tricks. Endurance entailed small apertures in the wall of confinement and designs overlaid onto the architectures of subjugation to cast illusory images. In a world that largely still “disappears” large numbers of black people, especially from its “advanced” cities, the urban cannot shake off all of the shadow worlds that for centuries have accumulated explorations and yearnings. From slavery to the present, blackness faces a world ill prepared to manage all of its untoward implications.

Black urban settlement required the honing of sensitivities that relied upon being ready to heed “the call”—the capacity to “call upon” all that had happened to a people, and to hear “its call.” No matter that the strivings for recognition, to be seen as “just as good as anyone else” led many to overcompensate and become parodies of those responsible for revitalizing the use of race as critical weapons at every important juncture. Blackness was something that always maintained its “design elements” to upend any clear reading of things.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

AbdouMaliq Simone is an Urbanist and Research Professor at the University of South Australia and Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London, 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.

For three decades Prof Simone has worked with practices of social interchange, cognition, local economy, and the constitution of power relations that affect how heterogeneous African cities are lived. In the past six years he has sought to re-examine some of these issues in urban Southeast Asia. He not only has acquired a substantial understanding of urban processes and change in Africa and Southeast Asia as a body of academic knowledge, but has worked on the concrete challenges of remaking municipal systems, training local government personnel, designing collaborative partnerships among technicians, residents, artists,and politicians.

REGISTRATION

Admission is free. We would greatly appreciate if you RSVP Mr Jonathan Lee via email: jonathan.lee@nus.edu.sg