Securing the Majority: Living through Uncertainty in Jakarta (original) (raw)
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Primary attention to cities in the Global South tends to focus on how fast they are changing in terms of spectacular new projects, the remaking of city centers, the pushing out of large numbers of urban residents of all social classes, and the extent to which cities are becoming more alike through these major development projects. Alternately, the focus is placed on the poor, on massive slums, insalubrious environmental and social conditions, and the potential threats posed by impoverished and unsettled urban populations. What lags behind is attention to the continued small and medium-level developments of residential and commercial districts that have occupied specific territories within cities for a long time. The article examines scales and domains through which it is possible for residents to provisionally configure ways in which they can recognize collective action and its impact on the making of space and time that raises unforeseen implications for present efforts to govern the city. Additionally, it looks at how urban districts provisionally consolidate unanticipated articulations among different territories and economies across the city. [Key words: .] [Author: Please provide 4 or 5 key words for this article.]
Although Jakarta seems to follow in the footsteps of other major Asian cities in its determination to flood the city with mega-developments, there are hesitations and interruptions along this seemingly smooth path. In the majority world, the onus of developing a viable place in the city largely fell to residents themselves, who then proceeded to elaborate intricate social and economic architectures of collaboration whose logics and operations were not easily translatable into the predominant categorizations employed by urban elites and authorities. These elites then attempted to disentangle these relationships, prioritizing the need for visibility, even as their own methods for retaining control were, themselves, usually opaque. This article explores how these ambiguous modalities of visibility are being reworked in contemporary Jakarta.
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Jakarta, Indonesia's primate city and the world's second largest urban agglomeration, is undergoing a deep transformation. A fresh city profile of Jakarta is long overdue, given that there have been major events and developments since the turn of the millennium (the Asian Financial crisis and decentralisation in Indonesia, among the most important), as well as the fact that the city is a living entity with its own processes to be examined. The inhabitants of the city have also taken centre stage now in these urban processes, including the recent pandemic COVID-19 response. Our paper profiles Jakarta heuristically in two cuts: presenting the city from conventional and academic perspectives of megacities like it, which includes contending with its negative perceptions, and more originally, observing the city from below by paying attention to the viewpoints of citizens and practitioners of the city. In doing so, we draw from history, geography, anthropology, sociology and political science as well as from our experience as researchers who are based in the region and have witnessed the transformation of this megacity from within, with the idea that the portrayal of the city is a project permanently under construction. 1. Everyday Jakarta Present-day Jakarta and its metro area seem a massive and chaotic jumble of concrete, asphalt, vehicles, and people. Each day the streets carry more than 20 million vehicles; every year, approximately 11% more motorcycles, cars, buses, and trucks take to the streets (BPS Provinsi DKI Jakarta, 2018). 1 On average, motorists spend more than half their daylight hours stuck in traffic, and when they can move, their speed is only about 5 km/h during rush period (Tempo.co, 2015). 2 The city (comprising Jakarta and its metro area) spans 4384 km 2 and has a population density of around 13,000 people per km 2 (Idem). Such a high population density makes land one of the most highly desired commodity in the city, a situation not unlike megacities elsewhere. The continual pressures a rising population put on scarce land result in acute mobility problems and permanent infrastructural deficiencies. Concomitantly, the competition for land in Jakarta gives rise to an endless cycle of conflicts, invasions, evictions, and eternal legal disputes between original owners, developers, and other powerful agents (Herlambang, Leitner, Liong Ju, Sheppard, & Anguelov, 2018). Every day, city and countryside seem to merge in this spatial conglomerate, in a sort of babel of skin and eye colors, languages, conversations, memories, shouts, watchful eyes, rumors and gossip. Intermingled with sirens, pounding and drilling, singing birds, helicopters' whumping roar, the adhan, 3 vehicle horns, squealing cranes, croaking frogs, vendors' harangues, quacking ducks, the roar of engines and the whistling of the wind all become part of the same ubiquitous miasma of vomit, urine, sweat, kretek, 4 stagnant water, burning trash, smoked meat, perfume, smog, gorengan, 5 kerosene, open sewage,