In The Surrounds renowned urbanist AbdouMaliq Simone offers a new theorization of the interface of the urban and the political. Working at the intersection of Black studies, urban theory, and decolonial and Islamic thought, Simone centers the surrounds-those urban spaces beyond control and capture that exist as a locus of rebellion and invention. He shows that even in clearly defined city environments, whether industrial, carceral, administrative, or domestic, residents use spaces for purposes they were not designed for: schools become housing, markets turn into classrooms, tax offices transform into repair shops. The surrounds, Simone contends, are where nothing fits according to design. They are where forgotten and marginalized populations invent new relations and ways of living and being, continuously reshaping what individuals and collectives can do. Focusing less on what new worlds may come to be and more on what people are creating now, Simone shows how the surrounds are an integral part of the expansiveness of urban imagination.

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 he has worked with practices of social interchange, cognition, local economy, and the constitution of power relations that affect how heterogeneous African cities are lived. Over the past six years he has re-examined some of these issues in urban Southeast Asia. He thereby acquired a substantial understanding of urban processes and change in Africa and Southeast Asia as a body of academic knowledge, and has worked on the concrete challenges of remaking municipal systems, training local government personnel, designing collaborative partnerships among technicians, residents, artists, and politicians. Simone is the author of For the City Yet to Come: Urban Life in Four African Cities (2004), Urban Africa: Changing Contours of Survival in the City (2005 with Abdelghani Abouhani) and City Life from Jakarta to Dakar: Movements at the Crossroads (2009). His latest book is entitled Jakarta: Drawing the City Near (2014).

Preface vii
Acknowledgments  xi
Introduction. Exposing the Surrounds as Urban Infrastructure  1
1. Without Capture: From Extinction to Abolition  21
2. Forgetting Being Forgotten  61
3. Rebellion without Redemption  100
Coda. Extensions beyond Value  134
References  139
Index  153