A new book titled Urban Lifetimes, authored by Emeritus Professor Maliq Simone and colleagues from the University of Sheffield, delves into the critical challenges confronting urban environments and their inhabitants. Published by Polity Press, the work addresses the multifaceted dangers of the climate crisis, health emergencies, uncontrolled artificial intelligence, escalating warfare, growing authoritarianism, and capitalist profligacy.
The book highlights the precarious future faced by unprotected urban populations, many of whom are experiencing dispossession and impoverishment. It questions the pathways available for cities to avert such a dire future for residents of modest neighbourhoods, suggesting that solutions lie within the popular practices and knowledges of urban communities.
According to the authors, these community-based approaches involve different engagements with time, fostering horizontal relations, affinities of place, and a 'restive knowledge' capable of innovation and adaptation. The book identifies these neglected ecologies of urban inhabitation as the foundation for future-making.
Urban Lifetimes offers a conceptual framework to understand this threatened yet resistant urbanism. It uses examples from cities such as Kinshasa, Lagos, Mexico City, and Naples to illustrate its points, and proposes an infrastructural and aesthetic politics to unlock the potential for a more hopeful urban future.
