City Life from Jakarta to Dakar

Turning hustlers into entrepreneurs, and social needs into market demands: Corporate–community encounters in Nairobi, Kenya

“…''Making a living'' (Chant, 2009) for youth 'hustling' in Mathare include a portfolio of income generating activities and livelihood strategies that were entangled with everyday street practices of ''hanging about'' (Jones, 2012;Weiss, 2009;Mabala, 2011). Often misunderstood, youth elicit polarised narratives (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2005, 20;Diouf, 2003) that mirror the competing discourses of the ''slum city'' as an lawless ghetto on the one extreme (Davis, 2006;Angotti, 2005) and a site of creative coping strategies and ''generative spaces'' at the other (Simone, 2010;Pieterse, 2008).…”

Thinking Geographically: Globalizing Capitalism and Beyond

“…Thinking (or unthinking) geographically about globalizing capitalism has uncovered abundant evidence of a wide variety of forms of economic life that resist, exceed, or simply are tangential to commodity production and market exchange, not only in supposedly traditional or less developed societies but also close to the heartbeat of globalizing capitalism (in such "global" cities as London or New York; e.g., Gibson-Graham 1996Lee 2006;Benjamin 2008;Roy 2009;Simone 2010;Massey 2011). Given globalizing capitalism's tendency to reproduce sociospatial inequality, failing to deliver on its promise, such alternatives should no longer be regarded as residual practices, withering away naturally in the shadow of capitalism's inexorable developmental trajectory.…”

Understanding Urban Processes in Flint, Michigan: Approaching ‘Subaltern Urbanism’ Inductively

“…Roy rejects a topological understanding of peripheral space, and instead favors Simone's (: 40) understanding as ‘space in‐between … never really brought fully under the auspices of the logic and development trajectories that characterize a center’. Peripheral space is linked to centers — most commonly through economic and cultural flows as well as the actual movement of people — but a disjuncture ruptures the logic of development that adheres in the center.…”

“…Certainly there are spaces that cannot be easily categorized as subaltern/non‐subaltern. For example, AbdouMaliq Simone (: 4) describes the daily transformation of the Oju‐Elegb neighborhood in Lagos, where the official regime that governs the use of urban space during the day gives way to an informal regime at night, and ‘the assemblage of discrepant activities seems to pile up on each other’. This neighborhood could be both subaltern and non‐subaltern, depending on the time of day, but classifying it as one or the other would miss this spatio‐temporal dynamic of alternating regimes.…”