D

uring his youth, Abdoumaliq Simone's parents constantly warned him about the dangers of roaming around Sierra Leone's capital city of Freetown.

Fearing for his safety, they tried to scare him off venturing into alleys or wandering the often-deserted streets.

Naturally, he did not heed their warnings.

Decades later, Simone is now a world-renowned "urbanist" who has written an array of books about his development projects in cities across Africa. He is currently teaching Sociology at the University of Goldsmith, London, and was recently in Jakarta to explore "creative industries."

"I have enjoyed thinking about cities since I was a child," he told The Jakarta Post during his visit.

"I was always interested in how cities work."

Simone said growing up in Freetown as a youth of Arab descent had helped shape his love for cities.

"We lived in a very isolated expatriate Arab neighborhood which was right next to a large slum. As kids we would always roam the city simply because we were told we couldn't," the 57-year old said.

The inability for isolated communities to interact and form a network with wider society is a key-concern of Simone's projects.

One of the features of Jakarta, he said, that sets it apart from other Asian cities, is the heterogeneity that allows socio-economic networking to flourish. This characteristic was not dissimilar to that found in some African cities he had worked in, such as Johannesburg and Dakar.

"Of all the cities I've been in it *Jakarta* had very similar traits to African cities... a lot of heterogeneity, reliance upon all kinds of different economies and personal effort to put bread on the table," Simone said.

This necessity for networking and sustainable urban economies was the crux behind his most recent visit to Jakarta.

Simone, along with a number of his students, have been participating in a small collaborative project between Goldsmith and Tarumanegara University to explore the networking that occurs in "creative" industries.

"The notion of creative industry as a kind of urban economy has been heavily emphasized in literature on urban development in the past decade," he said. "Particularly as a way to take ageing urban areas and use them for workshops to make things like jewelry and design."

Simone said Tebet in South Jakarta, which is home to several art galleries, and other areas of the city known for backyard furniture industries, were examples of this urban reinvention.

These industries connect people from different social and economic backgrounds together, he said, forming networks that can offer more resilience in the face of crises such as the global economic downturn.

Isolation, the very thing Simone resented, prevents networks from forming because interaction is reduced.

An exodus of the middle class from the suburbs, where they were able to interact with people from different socio-economic backgrounds, to high-rise apartments in the city, might also pose a threat to such interactions, he said.

"There is a trend in Jakarta where there is the production of more middle-income housing closer to the center of the city," Simone said. "These are people who have lost the experience of dealing with anyone other than themselves. They do not live side by side with the less fortunate."

One area of the city still displaying this kind of heterogeneity, he said, are the suburbs in the north, such as Warakas and Penjaringan.

"For example," Simone said, "a middle class family I know in Warakas, who have lived there for 25 years, have plenty of interaction with poorer people everyday despite them not being in their personal network."

These very neighborhoods were the ones that prompted him to come to Jakarta more than five years ago, and have drawn him back every year ever since.

Working with the Urban Poor Community (UPC), one of the local community empowerment groups, he contributed some of the models he used in his projects in African cities to help the people in the north's poorer districts get in touch with their own situation.

"There's going to have to be a huge investment in infrastructure for North Jakarta," he said, claiming mismanagement and climate change have already taken their toll in the area.

"We should get the right agencies involved in learning about the north of Jakarta, and assist them in playing a role in modern society."

For more than five years Simone has been working with the UPC to provide people from the northern districts with insightful advice on managing local areas. He has worked with the local government, financial investors and even the preman or hoodlums who have a considerable amount of power in the area.

His work has helped shape his fondness for Jakarta, with his passion lying in the city's romantic traits.

"*There is* a long history behind particular neighborhoods, particular streets," Simone said when reflecting on his earliest impressions of Jakarta. "You have a sense of how many things they've *Jakartans* been through in the past hundred years. And those kinds of things constantly remake parts of the city. I find that really interesting."

This affection for the city might eventually lure him to take up a more permanent posting in Jakarta, he said, but there were a few things he was still sensitive to even after years of working in Asia and Africa.