Cities of Uncertainty: Jakarta, the Urban Majority, and Inventive Political Technologies (original) (raw)
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Securing the Majority: Living through Uncertainty in Jakarta
Drawing on research in Jakarta, this article reconsiders the importance of heterogeneous economic practices in the remaking of central-city districts in ways that provide ongoing platforms of residence and operation for residents from wide-ranging walks of life. The emphasis on good governance and rights-based discourses have sometimes occluded the operations of urban real economies that, even if waning in the face of the proliferation of mega-developments, constitute the critical capacity of the majority of urban residents' efforts to secure a viable place in the city.
Cities, 2020
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,
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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While travelling with colleagues to East Kalimantan to do eldwork in the Indonesian capital city (IKN) in mid-July 2022, we collected 180 responses from people affected by the new capital site. In Java, the relocation of the Indonesian capital from Jakarta to purpose-built Nusantara in Kalimantan raises new hopes for both ruling elites and the Jakarta people. It is expected to eradicate severe congestion, unsustainable land use, and overpopulation in Jakarta, and the knock-on effects of these problems. These problems have haunted not only Jakarta, but also Java, for many decades. When we discussed these issues with our local respondents during informal and formal conversations, the rst impression we encountered was scepticism. This came not only from local academics, activists, and local people, but even local bureaucrats from regency and provincial levels in East Kalimantan.
Building the Road for the BMW: Culture, Vision and the Extended Metropolitan Region of Jakarta
Recent writings on Asian urbanization have stressed how the continuing outward expansion of the largest metropolitan regions has been eroding the long-standing distinction between rural and urban, particularly in terms of land use and economic structure. In this paper I examine the cultural implications of this phenomenon by looking at recent changes in the extended metropolitan region of Jakarta, Indonesia. Over the course of the 1980s, urbanization trends in Jakarta's periphery have resulted in a greatly expanded interface between urban and rural components of Indonesian society. Although this has created the opportunity for much broader popular participation in the urban economy, it may also be fostering a new perception within Indonesian society-that the primary social dichotomy lies not between the city and the countryside but between socioeconomic classes.
AbdouMaliq Simone 2014: Jakarta: Drawing the City Near . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2016
As a foreigner and outsider who has sought to immerse herself into the landscape and urban life of Jakarta for many years, Simone's book is a delicious read as he draws the city-its neighborhoods and residents-near through multiple storylines of the everyday. At times, his storylines capture Jakarta's milieu and buzz so well that I felt like a fellow traveler observing and sensing the beat of everyday life in its famous kampungs. Interestingly, Simone chose not to use this word, referring instead to the neighborhoods he studied as pluri-districts; in my opinion this label does not do justice to these neighborhoods, and is a term that Jakartans would not know or recognize. This left me wondering whether he has shared his work with the many co-researchers he states he relied upon in assembling the storylines presented in the book. The multiple storylines about transformations in neighborhood life, economic activities and the built environment do not stand on their own as factual accounts. Simone draws on currently popular Western philosophical concepts (notably assemblage theory and Deleuzian philosophy with its focus on becoming, relationality, fluidity, ambiguity, creativity and multiplicity) as lenses to capture his and his co-researchers' observations and experiences. This philosophy also seems to inform the mid-range concepts he deploys as the organizing principles for the majority of the book, introduced in the introduction: 'the near-South', 'the urban majority', 'devising relations' and 'endurance'. Each of chapters 1 to 4, described very briefly below, opens with abstract theoretical discussions that are full of neologisms of either Simone's or Deleuze's devising, which are then followed by multiple Jakarta storylines. While I have always admired Simone's unique, eloquent, disarming and engaging writing style (as fluid as the processes and practices he describes), at times I found it hard (especially in chapters 3 and 4) to relate the mid-range concepts to the storylines. This also made it difficult for me to ascertain how, as Simone claims, these concepts emerged from Jakarta as the field, as opposed to Jakarta being the backdrop for his theoretical ruminations. Thus I am left wondering: why invent new concepts, without engaging with those already in circulation in urban studies, and what novel insights do they make possible? Other reviewers have already commented on the methodology used to produce the storylines, but I want to add one point. Many of the storylines chronicled in the book seem to have been collected by resident co-researchers, but we hear little about them as the stories unfold. Who are they (beyond those explicitly acknowledged)? What were their interpretations of what they were observing? Why are they not named? The mid-range concepts proposed by Simone share a fluidity and multiplicity of meanings that make them difficult to hold on to, and to summarize. What follows are snippets, constrained by the length of this review. Views expressed in this section are independent and do not represent the opinion of the editors.
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.]
Jakartans, Institutionally Volatile
Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs, 2014
Jakarta recently has gained even more central political attention in Indonesia since Joko Widodo (Jokowi) and Basuki Purnama (Ahok) became, respectively, the province's governor and vice-governor in 2012. They started a series of eye-catching and populist programmes, drawing popular support from not only the people of Jakarta, but also among Indonesians in general. Jokowi is now even the most popular candidate for the presidential election in 2014. Their rise is phenomenal in this sense, but it is understandable if we look at Jakartan voters’ behaviour and the institutional arrangement that leads to it. Jakarta, as the national capital, has a unique arrangement in that the province has no autonomous regency or city. This paper argues that this arrangement causes Jakartans to be more politically volatile and describes how this institutional arrangement was created by analysing the minutes of the meeting to discuss the laws concerning Jakarta Province.