On 28th Novermber 2019, Professor AbdouMaliq Simone (Senior Professorial Fellow, Urban Institute, University of Sheffield and Honorary Professor of Urban Studies, Cape Town) will be delivering a Public Lecture, chaired by SEAC Director Prof. Hyun Bang Shin, on the emergent middle class in Jakarta.

This event relates to SEAC's #urbanisation theme.

Much has been made about how much an urban middle class has been made across Southeast Asia. There has been substantial debates about what makes a middle class and the values and behaviors they represent. The middle indeed is presently in the midst of many things, many contradictory tendencies, and instead of a middle class offering a picture of stability and alignment to global sensibilities about what it takes to succeed and make a viable life, it rather points to an often wild ride of practices and aspirations difficult to wrap up in any single framework. Often acting in what would seem to be against their best interests, cities are being pushed and pulled as residents change their minds and change gears as to what is to be considered the right ways to do things.

Professor AbdouMaliq Simone is an urbanist with an abiding interest in the spatial and social compositions of urban regions. In addition to his current post as Senior Professorial Fellow at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield, he is also a research associate at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, visiting 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. His present research examine unconventional processes of urbanization across extended urban regions in South and Southeast Asia, exploring particularly the kinds of analytical and governance frameworks necessary to address the disparate conjunctions of landscapes, aspirations, and economies prevalent in these regions. He also explores the effects of globalized generic blackness as an organizing instrument of urban life and the kinds of political instruments that are entailed in circumventing racialized control systems.

Prof. Hyun Bang Shin is the Director of Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, and Professor of Geography and Urban Studies in the Department of Geography and Environment 

Listen to and watch the presentation here