Contested Modernity. Sectarianism, Nationalism, and Colonialism in Bahrain

this purported low cost ‘public housing’ requires outlays well beyond the income of the vast majority, meaning that alternative arrangements are essential. He discusses the dizzying complexities of a housing market in which there is no uniformity and where the financing necessary for entry into these seemingly ‘nice’ serviced unit requires complex arrangements. To acquire a unit typically involves ‘reciprocal borrowing arrangements among families and affiliates, profits from collectively generated economic activities, savings groups, the diversion and laundering of illicitly obtained money, advances on rental agreements for other properties, property swaps, or amenities packages for employees.’ (p. 70) It is this ‘plurality of finance applied to the acquisition of units’ that ‘translates into the heterogeneity of residential compositions’ within this social housing. The financing challenges ring true since one of the initiatives of a municipal finance project that brought me to Jakarta to address housing and planning needs in the mid-1990s involved helping to create a secondary mortgage market so that financial institutions would be able to continuously infuse the housing market with new capital. The financial reform never happened thereby making the financing maze AbdouMaliq describes as the only alternativ. Improvised Lives is a journey through spaces and places that one cannot fully understand without spending a lot of time there and asking the right questions. AbdouMaliq tries to provides you with that ‘in-person’ view through his own experiences. To read this volume in a single stroke, as a unified story with a plot line and a roadmap to follow along the way, I found to be an impossible task. The way I found to digest it and to grasp its meanings, was to take it bit-by-bit, to revisit the passages, and draw upon my own experiences living, working and traversing Jakarta to understand not only those cases, but several of the others he features. I vividly remember wondering, when passing through districts in Jakarta like those he discusses, how these place work, what people living there do and what enables them to survive. If you have not directly experienced places like this, you will find Improvised Lives a challenge to fully digest. But if you are willing to keep going back to the stories lines he provides, it is a challenge that will more than likely you will resolve as you gain admiration for the realities of improvised urban life in Global South. You are also likely, as did I, to shift your perspective from depression and hopelessness to one of hope. In the end, Improvised Lives is stories of hope and success.