Forms of urban collective life in the global South

AbdouMaliq Simone

- completed -

This is a project of cross-institutional collaborative engagement that examines a broad fabric of relations, initiatives, efforts, and ways of paying attention, joining forces, and investing time and resources that take place as matters of intentional organization, but more importantly as a series of practices in which people engage so as to manage their everyday existence within cities. Focusing on Jakarta, Yangon, and Delhi, the project attempted to document and analyze a wide range of complementary actions, and of people operating in concert without necessarily the objective of doing so. Therefore, the notion of collective life is explicitly distinct from the notion of community, and does not imply any idea of consensus. Rather, the project emphasizes that the collective is plural and not necessarily agreed upon, i.e., it is just shared in its contradictions, ambiguities, multiplicities, and partialities.  Diversity is, in fact, one of its central resources.