Key points
- Simone: relationships and exchanges among people are the infrastructure that makes Southern cities work.
- The concept was born in inner-city Johannesburg after apartheid, where networks of migrants and traders replaced a withdrawn state.
- Recognising people as infrastructure obliges investment in them and not destroying their networks with every eviction.
Urban life depends on the creativity of informal networks is the thesis with which AbdouMaliq Simone, an urban sociologist at the University of Sheffield who has worked in Douala, Dakar, Johannesburg and Jakarta, changed the idea of infrastructure. A street starts working before everything is officially resolved: someone knows who can help, another person shares information, connects resources or improvises a temporary fix, and the city keeps moving. His question is what sustains urban life when formal institutions are insufficient, and his answer, formulated in the article People as Infrastructure (2004) and in For the City Yet to Come (2004), is that the relationships, ties and exchanges among people are the infrastructure that makes the cities of the Global South work.
Johannesburg after apartheid: where the concept was born
The concept was born in inner-city Johannesburg after apartheid. Simone observed how migrants from across Africa, traders, tenants of buildings abandoned by their owners and young people without formal jobs combined into networks that made it possible to live, trade and move in neighbourhoods from which the state and the formal market had withdrawn: a vendor connects with a transporter, a doorman with a moneylender, a church with a housing network. Those connections are not a poor substitute for material infrastructure but an infrastructure in themselves, able to coordinate action, distribute resources and produce opportunities that no formal organisation offered.
Assemblage: mobile, uncertain connections without romanticism
The mechanism is assemblage. People with different resources, knowledge and possibilities connect provisionally, one relationship gives access to another, an exchange opens an opportunity, and the outcome depends less on a formal organisation than on a chain of ties remade every day. Simone insists that this infrastructure is mobile and uncertain: connections do not always work, not everyone has the same ones and improvisation coexists with exploitation. He therefore does not romanticise informality; he describes it as the capacity to gather dispersed possibilities under scarcity, and as a practice public policy rarely sees because it looks only at official institutions.
From Jakarta to Dakar: the city yet to come in the later books
His later work extends the idea. City Life from Jakarta to Dakar (2010) follows the ways residents of the great Southern cities anticipate and negotiate change; New Urban Worlds (2017), with Edgar Pieterse, proposes an urban politics that starts from those practices; and Improvised Lives (2019) studies the popular districts of Jakarta and other cities where millions build life and housing in the gaps between large projects. In all of them, the city yet to come of his first book's title is the one those networks anticipate and that planning does not yet know how to recognise.
Influence, criticism and what recognising people as infrastructure demands
The contribution converses with Jane Jacobs's neighbourhood networks, with Ananya Roy's informality as a mode of urbanization and with the infrastructure studies of Susan Leigh Star and Brian Larkin, and has influenced urban theory from the South and neighbourhood upgrading programmes that support existing organisations instead of replacing them. Critics warn of the risk of turning the capacity to survive into an excuse for not providing services; Simone replies that recognising people as infrastructure obliges investment in them, not leaving them alone.
Simone's lesson is that the city works through installations and rules, but also through people who combine resources, and that this second infrastructure sustains most of the planet's urban residents. A planning that sees only pipes and roads destroys with every eviction and every project the networks that made a place habitable; one that recognises them can connect them with water, transport and services and turn the creativity of survival into the basis of a fairer city.
Frequently asked questions
What does it mean that people are infrastructure according to Simone?
That in Global South cities the connections among people with different resources, knowledge and possibilities, a vendor with a transporter, a church with a housing network, coordinate action, distribute resources and produce opportunities that formal institutions do not offer, working as a mobile, uncertain infrastructure that sustains urban life.
Does Simone romanticise informality?
No: he describes informal networks as the capacity to gather dispersed possibilities under scarcity, warns that they do not always work and coexist with exploitation, and argues that recognising them obliges investment and connection to water, transport and services, not leaving alone the people who sustain them.
