Transcript: ABDOUMALIQ SIMONE on Urban Entanglements /348
Ayana Young Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. Today we're speaking with Abdoumaliq Simone.
AbdouMaliq Simone The governance of urban space is increasingly predicated on a kind of systematic unsettlement to keep things uncertain—eviction, extrusion. But no matter how difficult urban life becomes, there is still the endurance of these kind of middle, uncertain, vulnerable, but yet dynamic middle positions in which a sense of what we might call nationhood attempts to be built.
Ayana Young To set up this episode, we wanted to offer some context to Abdoumaliq Simone's work as a scholar, theorist and researcher. In this episode, Simone talks us through the uncertain, vulnerable, and dynamic positions in the choreography of global cities and contemplates what it means to live in urban life. From the entanglements of resistance and protest, to surveillance and governance, to the effects of climate change on the city environment, Simone brings nuance and depth to this vital conversation. As humanity shapes the city, it shapes us in turn. And as the world rapidly urbanizes, Simone calls listeners to think about what an urban politics could be. As a researcher, Simone works on the interrelationship between urban, human, and nonhuman lives intersecting studies in social philosophy, economy, urban technology, posthuman studies, climate theory, and everyday life. During the last decade, he has worked with research and development institutions across the Global South to develop innovative programs of scholar, training, and research. He also focuses on issues of spatial composition and extended urban regions, the production of everyday life urban majorities in the Global South, infrastructural imaginaries, collective affect, global blackness and histories of the present for Muslim working classes. For three decades, he has worked on the constitution of power relations that affect how heterogeneous African and Southeast Asian cities are lived, considering the practices of social interchange, technical arrangements, and local economy. He has worked on remaking municipal systems, training local government personnel, and designing collaborative partnerships among technicians, residents, artists, and politicians. Above 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.
Well, Abdoumaliq, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm really excited to dive in.
AbdouMaliq Simone Thank you very much for the invitation.
Ayana Young Well, to begin, I would really love to ground this conversation in some of the ideas your work deeply engages with. So I'm wondering if you could offer a glimpse into what urbanism is, and how your work intersects with questions of globalization and shifting urban realities.
AbdouMaliq Simone Yeah, for many decades, I have tried to engage, to have something to do with, have something to say about urbanization processes across different geographies and different conditions. Basically, what it means to live an urban life, and what urbanization itself does to different forms of life, as well as different materials, and with an emphasis on basically how such processes are lived and the changes in the way in which they are lived. And from different vantage points from being a researcher to being an activist to working with different municipal governments to working with different community associations and social movements, different kinds of organizations on the ground. And trying to, I guess, most of all, take what are largely considered marginal conditions or from marginal geographies and find a way to make those kinds of experiences more visible and understandable to a kind of larger audience. With, at the same time, trying to also within that kind of representation, do it in such a way that doesn't leave those kinds of contexts more vulnerable to being extracted from, controlled. So this has been my orientation for quite some years.
Ayana Young Thank you. And you often refer to the urban majority. So could you explain how that concept helps to shape your work and understanding of the world?
AbdouMaliq Simone While since I've primarily worked in urban contexts in Africa and South Asia and Southeast Asia, I'm looking at and engaging in some ways who operates, who lives and operates in these urban contexts. And while it's possible to use the same kinds of categorizations that are probably most familiar, an urban elite to kind of upper middle class and middle class, lower middle class, working class, the poor as rough designations of who have the kinds of situations that are produced by urbanization processes, and also descriptive of the people who inhabit these kinds of contexts.
I also have been struck for a long time at the way in which there are these boundaries for the majority of residents often tend to be blurred, for there to be substantial intersections, both spatially in terms of everyday life, amongst different groupings of people, the kinds of complementarities, the co-dependencies, particularly in relationship to the poor, the working class and the lower middle class. And not only in the way in which there are spacial proximities often between these often seen as distinct groupings, but ways in which urban economy and livelihood are often thoroughly entangled amongst them. Not 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. And 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, and sort of referring to this as an urban majority.
Ayana Young In one of your lectures called "To Extend Temporariness in a World of Itineraries," you say, quote, "I want to briefly reflect on the way in which such temporariness inhabits the urban. How it may be the urban soul inhabitant, as the temporary itself seems to constantly unsettle what it means to inhabit, and how the cities and suburbs and peripheries are all kinds of strange urban formations perhaps should not be viewed as places to inhabit," end quote. So I'd love for you to dissect this and maybe explain how does temporariness come to infect urban life across the world?
AbdouMaliq Simone Yeah, I think in several different ways. I 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-construct, self-construction. Residents built not only the built environment largely on their own, with their own labor, and their own access to materials, but also built a way of inhabiting those spaces, or agreeing upon a set of norms, or a set of rules, or a set of common understandings for what it would take to live and work together—that people were prepared to do different things at different times.
For example, in Jakarta, one of the largest markets that supplies produce for all the neighborhood markets across the region is a night market. And it appears between 10 o'clock in the evening and six in the morning, and there's no trace of it during the day. But just before 10 o'clock, all of a sudden, the trucks come in, the stalls appear, everything is lined up, organized, and you have hundreds of people sitting out there fruits and vegetables and meats and other produce and, then, at six o'clock it disappears again. Meanwhile, at four in the morning, there are hundreds and hundreds of people coming and buying because they have to get the produce to their local markets when they open at six in the morning. But what's interesting about this market is that everyone else is prepared to do everyone else's job. So the person who's driving the truck from the hinterlands with the food, those that are unloading, those that set up the tables, those that organize the stalls, those that collect the fees to clean, those that sell—all of these are prepared to do everyone else's job. So in some ways, there is this kind of institutionalized sense of temporariness, so that with anything ever happens, things can be quickly refigured, rearranged at the spur of the moment, in case some new conditions appear. So there's also this kind of sense of temporariness.
And then in some ways the extensions, which you refer to—the way in which now for some of the largest cities in the world, it is these extended regions where most people are living and operating. For example, Jakarta, as a city, has just under 10 million. The region has 37 million. And so in these hinterlands, in these extended regions, these are places of convergence for all different kinds of projects, all different kinds of money, operating at all different kinds of scales, with all different kinds of forms of land acquisition. And so there is this sense that people do things with the urgency that if they don't do them now, then things will become unaffordable, that other people will start doing things so that there is the exigency to act now.
And so what happens is that many of these kinds of projects, whether they're industrial zones with factories, or whether they're 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. Many of them don't really see the light of day or last for more than more than five years. And so there's a turnover of projects, ways in which things are constantly being replaced, things that are changing hands. And now one sees in many of the large cities of the world where those districts of the 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. And so there is this sense of temporariness that 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? Already, 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. So 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. But in terms of the present, there is no sense of a long term commitment.
And 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 from work, and increasingly, transportation costs take up a larger share of their budget, that they will oftentimes seek temporary accommodation within the city. They'll rent a room, a hostel, maybe go back home wherever home is on the weekend. But what this also means then, is that there's a larger market for the provision of temporary accommodation. So even in some ways that the urban core becomes the kind of site of a temporariness in the sense that it houses workers and residents that are only temporary. And so you have within many districts of the urban core, a residential population, which is seen as in some sense, a temporary one, they 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.
Ayana Young In your book, The Surrounds: Urban Life Within and Beyond Capture, you explain, quote, 'the surrounds' as, quote, "Urban spaces beyond control and capture that exist as a locus of rebellion and invention, " end quote. And I would just love if you could further elaborate on this concept and the physicalities of structure and space that make rebellion and invention possible.
AbdouMaliq Simone I mean, I think in the book, I think 'the surrounds' becomes much, much more of a device to think about different kinds of openings, different kinds of time spaces, different kinds of practices, different kinds of tactics that don't have a stable appearance or definition, but are in some ways always shape shifting in in different kinds of ways. And so, in some ways, it has to do with the fact that every attempt to compartmentalize. There are spaces that are not that are clearly designated. There are industrial spaces administrative, domestic, festive, logistical, carceral. familiar, but 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. There's always something in their enactment, that isn't doesn't fall within the ambit,within the rubric of the definition. because there'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 proportionality is, you know—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. Just 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 super[unknown]-ceded by others.
So in this relationship between things that are well-defined, where there's something leftover, 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'—a kind of interstitial space. Something that is either indeterminate in terms of what it's made up of, or where it seems to be determinant, that there's something left over. The question is, then how do we think about these kinds of spaces? How do we think about the way in which they can be used and lived in or maybe not inhabited at all? Maybe left to their own devices in some way, as is a great deal of the urban fabric, where there are spaces where it's not clear exactly what takes place there, even if they fall under particular kinds of zoning regulations or administrations. And also the fact that in terms of the governance of the function of every space, whether it be a familiar one, whether it be a public one, there are many different kinds of administrative logics that are brought to bear. And these are not seamless, they are oftentimes partial. They're oftentimes tensions and contradictions amongst them. They are seldom complete or comprehensive. And so thinking of 'the surrounds,' as always a kind of interstice as a kind of middle space, a middle space between things that are overly-defined and overly-uncertain. Because in the book is that…we think about the urban as a kind of locus or a domain of settlement that people settle. They find a place to try to call their own, to consolidate some kind of stability, a kind of platform from which to operate, a way to be addressed rather than address a way of being addressed, to settle, to have some kind of consistency, continuity. And certainly that kind of notion of settlement, human settlements prevails. But increasingly, the administration, the governance of urban space, is increasingly predicated on a kind of systematic unsettlement, to unsettle, to keep things uncertain.
I mean, the urban itself is a kind of volatile space. It is by definition a volatile turbulent space. But instead of trying to settle that turbulence, to administer it in a way, to stabilize it, increasingly, the logic is, in some ways to ride with the turbulence, to mobilize it in some way. And so part of this notion of unsettlement is manifested, of course, in the kinds of precarity and vulnerabilities that particularly the poor, but other residents of the city, experience in terms of their ability to find affordable, sustainable places to live, sustainable kinds of work. But there's also in addition to this kind of forced displacement, eviction, extrusion, a kind of a mode of operation, which uses unsettling as the kind of normative way in which to operate within the urban.
Ayana Young How does your work balance the theoretical with the practical realities and processes?
AbdouMaliq Simone Well, I'm not sure if it ever balances it. These are trajectories and threads that certainly are emphasized in the work oftentimes without a kind of clear resolution or easy integration. But 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, collective, everyday life movements that exert a kind of force that don't always appear within recognizable forms, like a community association, or local government institution. That these institutions and organizations are, are critically important, but there's something else besides, besides in both senses of the term right next to it something else that in some ways, are concrete, real, collective enactments that in some ways can't be read through the kind of conventional sociological languages. Which is why I oftentimes refer to music and to improvisation and to choreography as a way of reading, the ways in which residents, people operating within the city, come together, coordinate, align, operate collaboratively even if it is not a kind of conscious aspiration or goal, and rather something much more implicit. So in a way, the kind of theoretical language in which are used to attempt to describe the simultaneity of many different kinds of enactments, the simultaneity of many different kinds of events and activities and livelihoods and ways of doing things, trying to discover on the ground and work with on the ground, these kinds of more what might be called machinic, implicit forms of collective work that oftentimes accompany the work of institutions. So in this way, I try to explore both the kinds of theoretical elaborations on urbanization, but find some kind of way of working on the ground that is able to engage, or at least to enable policy makers and other actors to become more aware of these kinds of forces and collected performances.
Ayana Young Gosh, so much to chew on there. I'm wondering how can we create and celebrate spaces of rebellion without overly romanticizing or sensationalizing these narratives?
AbdouMaliq Simone Yeah, I mean, this is an important question that always is, and must be asked. In my experience, it is oftentimes difficult to disentangle what are familiar acts of resistance or rebellion from a much more complicated and messy fabric of actions that certainly wouldn't count in any way as a kind of resistance or rebellion. So for example, within the sort of everyday life realities of those urban majority districts that we refer to before, that certainly there are simultaneously inordinate acts of generosity, of collaboration, of fearless refusal to accept impositions either on the part of policy makers or the police, but oftentimes entangled with very clear acts of compliance, of submission, of parasitism, of manipulation, of judgment that constrain the kind of initiatives and autonomies that people can exhibit. And in a way, there is this simultaneity of all very different kinds of practices and it becomes a kind of back and forth, a kind of almost reciprocal process where clear initiatives of autonomy or resistance are undertaken. And then people within the same district find ways of attempting to capitalize on them or to defuse them or to ride them for their own self interest. And then people see this, becomes a visible kind of enactment, and then others play off of that and say, Alright, no, we will then try this particular way of fighting or circumventing or navigating or undermining. This kind of back and forth can be important, because it means that in these different kinds of responses, the attempt to initiate something, others attempted to fuse it, others are complicit with authorities to try to cut off things of the past. It 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, which 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.
So I think that in some ways, the attempt to ensure that one doesn't romanticize the sort of value and 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. And 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. And 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. That's why I said that 'the surrounds' is more of a kind of device for a kind of ongoing, shape shifting series of orientations and practices that may not remain the same over time, and may result in rebellions that don't look like rebellions. So in some ways, I think it is a matter of not of staking our analysis on resistance or rebellion in the kinds of tropes and vernaculars that we're familiar with, but to see different ways of doing things as important. And some of these kinds of desires and aspirations require different kinds of arrangements, different kinds of organizing. And therefore, there's a kind of simultaneity of things that oftentimes maybe don't easily go together. And I think that in some ways, becomes the kind of perspective that is important, so as not to in some sense, romanticize and say, "Oh, the popular classes and the popular territories are always in this kind of process of creating new possibilities, new demands and new victories."
Ayana Young Yeah, I really see how the structure of temporariness contributes to rupture and change and deviation from the static continuum. And I have a question now on shaping the modern citizens subject and I'm wondering how do we come to understand cities and how do city structure shape life, especially within the context of the modern nation state?
AbdouMaliq Simone Well, I mean, this has a great deal of, of variance across different kinds of political contexts. For example, in Cairo, in Egypt, in the last several years, you've had nearly 2 million residents up-ended from the places where they live, and folded into all of these new constructions at the periphery. And in part, this is a kind of reaction by the Egyptian regime, which basically predicates its existence on saying that, you know, The turmoil, and the chaos of 2011 will never happen again.
And so in some ways, the Egyptian state is almost about to bankrupt itself in terms of building a new capital east of Cairo, which is basically absorbed billions and billions of dollars, many of it going into the coffers of the military itself as the administrator of the construction of this new capital. And then in some ways, completely eviscerating working class and poor neighborhoods, and rehousing them within settlements that are very heavily surveyed almost carceral in their character. And so here clearly is the notion of trying to very concretely, through a complete restructuring of Cairo, attempt to create a kind of citizen, a compliant citizen, that somehow doesn't dare then to undertake certain kinds of potentially revolutionary actions in the future.
And 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. Rather, it is simply a kind of bastion of mass popularization, 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. In 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.
So 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, you know, the classic kind of neo liberal subject.
But on the other on the other hand, there are so many different varying situations, I mean, what we just saw in in France, which is a way in which the structures of internal colonialism continue to be reproduced as the mode for for governing urban areas where you have oscillating practices on the part of the police that either act as an occupying army or simply withdraw, simply aren't present. So, it's an important question, but one in some ways that is difficult to answer, because I think, increasingly there is no kind of collective project in terms of trying to forge a dynamic notion of a citizenry. It's often more of a harsh necro-political situation in terms of deciding who's eligible for a life that's worth living, and life sustaining. How in what ways is that to be protected through, in some ways, either actively demonizing, punishing, or undermining a large proportion of an urban population or leaving it to its own devices through under-investing or divesting in terms of their social reproduction.
It doesn't mean though, again, that in the middle of these trajectories, that there isn't a very kind of dynamic, consistent way in which residents attempt in oftentimes very fractured, fragile, incomplete ways to continue to design local institutional structures and ways of collaborating that attempt to sort of offer a way of collective responsibility, of a way of caring for each other, have a way of paying attention to each other, a way of working with each other. I mean, I'm struck with no matter how difficult urban life becomes that there is still the endurance of these kinds of middle, tentative, uncertain, vulnerable, but yet dynamic middle positions, in which a sense of what we might call nation time or nation hood attempts to be built.
Ayana Young Another article that you wrote,"Counting the Uncountable: Revisiting Urban Majorities," you explained that you wish to, quote, "turn our speculative energies in a different direction, one that does not celebrate the resilience of the majority at the cost of their marginalization. One that recognizes actions from below that may fundamentally alter the shape of state power itself," end quote. I'd really like to focus for a moment on this distinction. So I'm wondering how can we learn to pay proper attention to these so-called actions from below?
AbdouMaliq Simone Well, I think there are situations where, I mean, the women's movement in Argentina largely came from the ways in which neighborhoods—the difficult situations that women faced, as both caretakers, workers, neighborhood stabilizers, fighting against violence, fighting against precarity—the ways in which different neighborhoods undertook different kinds of rehearsals and experiments, and then discovered each other discovered ways that things were taking place over there. And they discovered things taking place over there. You know, over the years, the way in which these kinds of rehearsals, these kinds of experiments, were able to be articulated through a national women's movement.
I mean, even even going back to Cairo for a moment the the revolution in 2011 was itself the product of very different kinds of experiments on varied neighborhood and local levels, in terms of organizing popular markets organizing, collective service provision, organizing mass after school programs on each neighborhood, the different ways in which Islamic organizations banded together across particular neighborhoods. So in some ways, it's just saying to pay attention to all of the ways, the small ways, that these kinds of rehearsals, these kinds of experiments, try to not only do their thing, and to consolidate themselves as an important contributor to the endurance of their territories, but also the way in which they discover each other and what that discovery looks like. And the way they try to negotiate working together, oftentimes not in some kind of grand coalition, but the way they pay attention to each other, the way they share resources, the way they attempt to identify lines of connection to other things that are taking place. And oftentimes, the work of of so-called development funding, or NGO work within cities, often attempts to try to have organizations claim their territory or claim their sector or claim their actors without necessarily following the lines of articulation without following the lines of how one thing leads to another, of one kind of initiative opening on to others. And so all I was suggesting in this is that methodologically, we need the ways to sort of follow those lines and to give credence to them in some ways.
The way in which in Cali, the different kinds of neighborhoods under assault of police and excessive extractive taxation on their popular economic activities, basically mobilized to keep administrators and police out. And in doing so was formed by the kind of coalition on the part of different actors within these communities that never collaborated before. So, you know, women in the market and gangsters and people who were school teachers and ministers and the way in which they discovered each other as a way to attempt to try to win spaces of autonomous action and protect somehow the integrity of their neighborhoods.
Ayana Young Yeah. 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?
AbdouMaliq Simone I 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. And 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 when one uses public transportation. In 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. So urban urban life is completely surrounded, in many ways.
But what this then means is that if there is this kind of capacity to track and to monitor, then the kinds of infrastructural and bio political investments that were made in trying to keep people put stationary in place as the grounds of urban governance becomes not necessarily jettison. But with the confidence that... so what happens is that you can see to the fact that people are going to be mobile, that you don't, in some sense, try to keep them in line by keeping them in place. It's like ... I'll give you an example, in Sao Paulo, perhaps the largest formal employer of young black men in the city is motorbike delivery. And what this does is that in some ways it's a very precarious job. It's very taxing; it's like you almost never leave your bike. The conditions are really terrible. You don't make that much money. But on the other hand, you talk to these, and they're mostly men, but not completely but you talk to these young men and and when Men. And what they will tell you is that... Where is my home? Well, the entire region is my home because I know this place. I've been everywhere. I know exactly what's going on everywhere. I'm not in my barrio. I'm not in my hood. I may have to sleep there. I may not find any other place to pay rent or to have a kind of domestic life outside that hood. But I certainly don't live there. That's not the space I inhabit. I inhabit the entirety of Sal Paulo, because I circulate through Sao Paulo, and I know it. And I know it in my own particular way. I see the shadows. I see the idiosyncrasies, I see the things that are weakly guarded, I see the ways in which certain cameras are broken. I see certain kinds of underpasses.
So in some ways, what I'm trying to suggest is, yes, there is this kind of more extensive surveillance infrastructure, but that accompanies a kind of more extensive circulation of bodies, and bodies are oftentimes had been considered ineligible to be within certain spaces now circulating through those spaces, albeit it as some of the most precarious labor but yet have a way for themselves to valorize that in ways that say, We know this place, and we know it in ways that no one else knows.
Ayana Young Gosh, this has been such a sweeping conversation and so much detail to mull over. But I definitely want to speak just briefly about climate change within urban contexts 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. So 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?
AbdouMaliq Simone Yeah, I mean, right now, I hear every day, for example, from my friends in Karachi about how basically the city is in some ways uninhabitable through the the intensity of heat, and the way in which that factor of heat ramifies in all aspects of life--massive increases in domestic violence, in the way in which energy consumption becomes unaffordable. So it ramifies in all directions, substantiating vulnerabilities ad and precarities. So, in terms of the way in which you you frame the question, that there is in some also sense the, when people say "we cannot live like this any more," is not just a kind of reaction to these much more intensively debilitating environmental conditions, but a way in which the very terms of the household is being reorganized, the way in which people feel that their only chance of enduring is to find different ways of sharing resources, different ways of collective management over the limited resources that they do have, the ways in which certain residents are designated as responsible for going elsewhere to explore different kinds of positions in other parts of the country or in other cities. Where in some sense local community, neighborhood, family, household life becomes, in some sense, increasingly dispersed, reorganized, but exploratory, have different ways of being a being together and operating in concert. Again, practices that are fraught, improvisational, experimentation are tentative in a way in which the climatic conditions are increasingly perceived as being ameliorated only through a kind of commitment to change the way in which their voices say "the way in which we live" and that we have to do something really drastic in terms of how we value each other, and the kinds of values that we prioritize. So I think in some ways, there's this kind of refusal to be climate victims, and a sense of a kind of radical disjuncture emerging in terms about how everyday urban life is organized within these districts. But I have to emphasize that that also takes place with a kind of intensification of the tropes of populism, of redemption. So again, it's not a clear cut trajectory. It's a messy process. Things are conjoined and all kinds of difficult and oftentimes strange ways. But emerging from this is also a kind, I think, a commitment to materializing these disjunctures.
Ayana Young My goodness, well so thank you so much for this very complex and winding conversation. I can't wait to listen again and really pause and think through some of what you're bringing up because it's important and clearly, you've put so much time and thought into this. So thank you for sharing your work with us. I really appreciate the time.
AbdouMaliq Simone Thank you for your thoughtful questions. I really appreciate having this conversation with you.
Evan Tenenbaum Thanks for listening to For The Wild. The music in today's episode is by Jahawi. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Julia Jackson, Jackson Kroopf, José Alejandro Rivera, and Evan Tenenbaum.