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The Surrounds

The Surrounds

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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. Working at the intersection of urban theory, Black studies, and decolonial and Islamic thought, AbdouMaliq Simone offers a new theorization of the interface of the urban and the political. AbdouMaliq Simone is Senior Professorial Fellow at the Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield and author of For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities, also published by Duke University Press, Improvised Lives: Rhythms of Endurance in an Urban South, and Jakarta: Drawing the City Near. 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

“AbdouMaliq Simone is like Lawrence ‘Butch’ Morris. His lectures, his rehearsals, are conductions that sound and show the inseparability of the theory and history of radical practice. What he gathers of the surrounds, in The Surrounds, is the generative disruption, the general strike, that persists under the duress and in the toxic radiation of the city. People live a kind of radiance in terror and deprivation whose ubiquity makes it seem unlikely. Simone insists on every aspect of such presence, teaching us how to learn from it, and with it, so that we, too, might practice it, (every)where it’s at.”
“The Surrounds is a special example of a very refined voice, a voice that travels, returns, meanders, and cycles among encounters with places, friends, and thinkers as one would travel through the spaces of a city. With poetic economy, AbdouMaliq Simone tells a cautionary tale for those who put their faith solely in data, master plans, and standards. His sophisticated story is at once explicit and indeterminate. You can learn about the city’s solids and beings, but you cannot know how they will collide.”

Additional information

Weight 1 oz
Dimensions 1 × 6 × 9 in