Son[i]a #457

AbdouMaliq Simone’s work traces the shifting grounds of urban life through an attention to blackness as both lived condition and analytic vantage. Drawing on Frantz Fanon’s sense of a non-actualized existence, Simone approaches Blackness not as a fixed identity but as a mode of inhabiting the world that remains open, provisional, and constantly negotiated. This emphasis informs his notion of the Middle, a space of indeterminacy where social forms, infrastructures, and subjectivities are neither fully stabilized nor entirely absent. In this Middle, everyday practices, often improvised and collectively held, become the terrain through which life is sustained amid uncertainty.

Much of Simone’s research engages what he terms ‘popular territories’: urban formations across Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia that exceed formal planning and governance. These territories emerge through layered circulations of people, materials, and aspirations, producing spatialities that are simultaneously fragile and generative. Rather than viewing informality as lack, Simone reads these environments as sites of dense coordination, where residents continuously recalibrate relationships to space, authority, and livelihood. Central to this perspective is Simone’s concept of extensionality, which names the ways relations stretch across households, neighborhoods, and economies, allowing individuals to mobilize partial connections and provisional alignments. In this sense, infrastructure is not only technical but social: people themselves become the conduits through which resources circulate and possibilities emerge. 

In this podcast, AbdouMaliq Simone talks at length about blackness as doubleness, structural neglect, fragmented opportunities, collective minds, extended urbanisation and Sao Paulo’s PCC as an interesting case study. Through these ideas, he invites a reconsideration of urbanism as a field shaped less by fixed structures than by the ongoing, relational labor through which inhabitants inhabit that intersticial middle space.

With the support

_{Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.}