Jakarta: Drawing the city near is a highly original tour de force that will delight and inspire many, and frustrate others. Surprisingly few studies of this huge city, or of any other city in Indonesia, exist. Towns are even less well documented. Yet nearly half the country's population of 250 million is urban. This eloquent, agenda-setting book ought to stimulate more researchers to turn once more to the city.

AbdouMaliq Simone has previously written about African cities. While observing places like Douala, Dakar, and Johannesburg, he developed insights into the hidden order urban residents manage to create even in the virtual absence of formal government. Kinshasa, for example, is a ‘city renowned for lacking almost everything. Yet it sustains, however barely, nearly ten million inhabitants’ (p. 209). This fascination with the informal as a source of positive energy proves fruitful in Jakarta as well. He admires the way traders and buyers each day move vast quantities of goods in and out of Jakarta's labyrinthine traditional markets with minimal fuss on motorcycles and handcarts. Most of the land in the city has no formal title — people claim it on the basis of living there and paying taxes on it.

‘Informal’ often means ‘illegal’ as well. An anecdote relates how retailers of pirated software, in one of the mega-complexes that sell little else, have been known to initiate bogus raids on their own premises. The idea is to make the bureaucrats who are responsible for policing the trade anxious that perhaps some other government agency knows about their complicity in it, thus immobilising them (p. 49). Violence is an everyday reality. Strong-arm thugs routinely make traders pay illegal taxes and force residents to vacate valuable real estate. The massive brawls between neighbouring urban communities known as tawuran have been going on for decades and seem to be getting worse, yet nobody can explain why they happen.

The book's uniqueness lies in its method. AbdouMaliq Simone combines closely observed ethnography with a philosophy that owes much to Gilles Deleuze. Actually, the ethnography at the heart of it asks fairly mainstream questions. Following a trend in urban sociology since the 1990s, he has gone back to the Chicago School that founded urban sociology in the 1920s and ‘30s. Without naming Robert E. Park or any of the other greats, Simone shares with them the idea of the city as a social laboratory. Like them, he focuses on problem neighbourhoods, looking for ways to promote cooperative human relationships in the midst of urban disorder created by capitalism. Marx comes in, but not through an economic analysis of mechanisms of exploitation. Rather, Simone's reading of E.P. Thompson's The making of the English working class provides him with his model of ‘a structure of feeling’ among the city's residents.

He strikes out into new territory when he adopts a language of analysis that is deliberately fluid rather than neatly bounded. There are few numbers or statistics in the text. The book has no map of Jakarta, and that could be deliberate. The section on ‘the limits of maps’ (p. 160) cites Deleuze and Guattari to make the following point: ‘The inherent instability of constellations thus requires thinking of matter as fundamentally unstable and fluid, as an emergent property of the very process of constellations’ coming-into-formation.’ This is perhaps the moment when adherents of more orthodox urban sociology begin to feel frustrated. The reason is not simply that the text is demanding, since that is also what makes it so rewarding. Nor that so many long passages of generalising discourse are unrelieved by empirical material and punctuated by idiosyncratic terminology — though I have to confess to skimming some of those pages on a first read. The reason is rather a philosophical refusal to commit to the agreed marker concepts that others find essential when talking about the city and making policy for it. This is a book about the everyday life of a city. In Simone's opinion, life can evidently not be captured with conventional, replicable data.

This does not mean he disdains policymakers: on the contrary. A policy chapter at the end recommends radical democratisation of city governance, and even a basic income guaranteed for all. Both ideas are aimed at halting the destructive trend of privatisation sweeping the city's infrastructure. Policymakers should persist to the end of this book!

The title of each of the four substantive chapters indicates a different social process taking place in the city. All are innovative, and reveal something that is perhaps invisible to conventional urban studies. The phrase ‘near-South’ heading up the first suggests that the city is nearly but not quite part of the global South. While in many ways homogenised by global capital and thus like every other large city around the world, its interstices are dominated by the informal, which makes the city distinctly postcolonial. ‘Urban majority’ points to the social demographics of the city, most of whose residents belong neither to the poor nor to the individualistic middle class. (The love of organising and political agitation among Asia's rapidly growing urban lower middle class also attracted our attention when my colleagues and I looked at Indonesia's mid-sized towns; we called this social formation Middle Indonesia). ‘Devising relations’ refers to the myriad uncharted and ‘counterintuitive’ ways in which those who broadly belong to this social formation make a living. Within the interstices of the city's skyscrapers and tollways, they constantly create new connections. And ‘Endurance’ is about the risks they take each day to act like citizens, despite the failure of so much formal government.

A sense of hope suffuses the book as a whole that reminds me of Ernst Bloch. One sentence on the last page encapsulates the message well that researchers should take home with them: