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This intervention shares images and stories from the women evictees in Jakarta who collectively give voice to the psychic, physical, and material injuries inflicted by state dispossession in the city. Engaging Ann Laura Stoler's (2013) language to expose the politics of ruination and preservation, we illustrate the gendered nature of the remaking o...
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The development of railways in Indonesia is related to the exploration and exploitation of the Dutch Colonial Government. This mode of transportation is used for the transport of agricultural commodities so that a compilation of enforced planting politics is enforced. Indramayu is one of the areas on the island of North Java which is traversed by t...
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... These movements are also proactively inventing spaces from which to claim rights exceeding those of liberal democratic citizenship, such as collective or communitarian rights, the right to place and the right to stay put (Betteridge and Webber 2019;Lefebvre 1991;Tilley, Elias, and Rethel 2017). These are key claims advanced by Right to the City movements, in which those inhabiting urban space advance what could be called residential rights for all-an important aspect of anti-eviction campaigns in cities across the globe (Roy and Malson 2019; Weinstein 2021). ...
... These settlements are often referred to as 'slums' in the literature. 4 While the paper primarily focuses on countries in the global South, it is essential to note that the question of informal housing and tenure insecurity remains relevant in the context of the global North as well (see Soederberg, 2021Soederberg, , 2017. 5 Informal housing settlements have been meticulously studied by critical geographers and urban studies scholars (Auerbach, 2020;Chatterjee, 2014;Davis, 2006Davis, , 2004Ghertner, 2014;Tawakkol, 2021;Tilley, Elias, & Rethel, 2017). However, what sets this paper apart is its distinctive contribution to the IPE literature. ...
In recent years, International Political Economy (IPE) scholars have increasingly turned their attention to cities. However, their primary focus has been on the role of a select few global ‘cities’ that regulate global flows of capital, goods, and services. Nonetheless, a significant gap in the IPE literature pertains to the limited exploration of how pro- cesses of neoliberal globalization are impacting and regulating the low-income ‘informal’ housing sector in cities located in the global South. To address this gap in the existing IPE literature, this paper critically analyzes the processes of formation and demolition of informal housing settlements against the backdrop of the neoliberal regime of accumu- lation. Informal housing settlements have been extensively examined by critical geogra- phers and scholars in the field of urban studies. What distinguishes this paper is its unique contribution to the literature on IPE, that is, it utilizes the political economy of informal housing settlements as an entry point to critically analyze social ontology and the inherent contradictions of the postcolonial state. The paper argues that the relation- ship between informal housing settlements and the postcolonial state can be better understood through the lens of the ‘institutional hybridity.’ This concept refers to the fusion of contradictory socio-economic and institutional impulses within the postcolo- nial state, which aims to manage social reproduction and capitalist accumulation simul- taneously. The inherent tension between social reproduction and accumulation manifests in the informal housing settlements in the form of a dialectic of ‘benevolence-violence.’ On one hand, the postcolonial state attempts to appear ‘benevolent’ towards marginal- ized groups by ‘allowing’ them to establish informal housing settlements through a multi-layered network of clientelism. On the other hand, the postcolonial state resorts to violent displacement of marginalized groups as soon as they pose obstacles to real estate-led capitalist accumulation. Thus, the paper contends that IPE scholars should carefully consider the political economy of informal housing settlements, as it provides captivating insights into the mechanisms through which the postcolonial state becomes subject to regulation and is pulled in different directions by the socio-economic forces of neoliberal globalization.
... Against this background, the recent bout of slum removal in Jakarta provides an opportune case study of a situation in which high-profile resistance movements have struggled to limit removals. As a result, contemporary exploration of forced eviction in Jakarta is largely centred on the grassroots resistance movement mounted by kampung residents (Tilley et al., 2017;Betteridge and Webber, 2019;Colven and Irawaty, 2019), and how class-based activism is entangled and foregrounded in electoral politics (Savirani and Aspinall, 2017;Wilson, 2017; for the context of India see Coelho and Venkat, 2009;Ghertner, 2015). Other strands of eviction scholarship concern the political economy of eviction, tracing the narratives and justification of the removals to flood governance (Padawangi and Douglass, 2015;van Voorst, 2016;Dovey et al., 2019;Padawangi, 2019) and to the city's quest for modernization through market-oriented principles (Wilson, 2017;Leitner and Sheppard, 2018;Betteridge and Webber, 2019;van Voorst, 2020). ...
This article explores the contours of modernization in the unmaking and remaking of homes among evicted and resettled families in highrise housing. We examine the trajectories of forced eviction by drawing upon interviews with 17 individuals from nine evicted families who have transitioned from living in informal settlements to highrise social housing (rusunawa) in Jakarta. Drawing on two strands of literature-'developmental idealism and the family' from population studies and the critical geographies of 'homemaking'-we argue that the demolition of houses is but an initial event in a long, quiet and subtle, yet profoundly defining, process of 'upgrading' families as part of 'improving' society, according to developmental logic. The disciplining of the urban poor does not end with the demolition of their houses, but rather continues as part of the fulfilment of shelter. This article attends to the slow unravelling of home hidden and embedded in post-eviction everyday lives, which are often overlooked because of the overt and violent brutality of forced eviction. While eviction can be seen as the violent visual expression of developmentalism, we argue that the relocation in rusunawa is where this ideal permeates into daily domestic life, making mundane activities a battleground for different ideals of 'home'.
... The ruin of the kampung itself thus becomes a site of resistive politics. 20 In these four vignettes from our research, there is much to appeal to scholars of both IPE and IPS: security and safety, economic transformations, materiality, surveillance, violence, rationalisation, the uneven development of the global cityscape, poverty and resistance. For us, a feminist political economy approach in which global economic transformations are seen as taking shape and impacting at the level of everyday life is one that instinctively speaks to IPS -not least its underlying 'ethos' of 'encouraging research that troubles established ways of understanding the international -where it is found, when it emerges, and what kind of work it does in the world'. ...
... The municipal state repeatedly threatens to evict residents living in kampungs designated as illegal (on the basis of claims that they violate public order regulations), in the name of the supposed common good (recently, flood mitigation). These evictions have gendered implications, disadvantaging women who more often are involved in home-based informal economic practices alongside their 'double' role as unpaid family providers (Tilley 2017, Tilley, Elias andRethel 2017). 11 In addition, real estate developers, unable to launch evictions in the age of reformasi, offer unheard of riches to residents living in kampungs designated as legal, in return for their agreeing to sell whatever land rights they can acquire, and relocate. ...
Thinking through Jakarta, this paper explores the possibility of decentering understandings of conditions of possibility for economic transformation across the post-colony, by shifting the optic away from European-style Capitalism. Colonialism, racism and slavery enabled the hegemony of European-style Capitalism, characterized by nation-states and the rule of law. The bulk of the theorizing within geographical political economy elides alternative possibilities because it views the world from this perspective. Conceptualizing capitalism’s raggedy fringes (informality, state actions, and the more-than-human world) as more-than-Capitalist practices with the capacity to unravel Capitalist norms, positional conjunctural analysis can provide the methodological space to think beyond the North Atlantic, creating space for envisioning alternatives. Operationalizing these claims, I argue that Indonesia’s political economy exceeds variegated European-style capitalism, and that urban land transformations within Jakarta are deeply shaped by its raggedy fringes of elite and grassroots informality and more-than-human hydrological processes of flooding and water management.
... The context for this research is what has been described as the 'evictions regime' enacted in Jakarta under the recent governorship of Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (Ahok) from November 2014 to early 2017 (see Eddyono et al 2017;Wilson 2016;Tilley et al 2017;Irawaty 2018). This evictions regime followed a long history of urban poor dispossession in the city but signified a notable intensification both in terms of the numbers evicted, and in terms of the injustice in the way the evictions themselves were effected. ...
... Returning to the Jakarta context, the reordering of space in European form has a long history. From the seventeenth century, the Dutch remaking of the city then known as Batavia as the 'exemplary centre' of its settlements in the East Indies (see Abeyasekere 1989: 6; Tilley et al. 2017) sought to rationalise a previously complex urban area which had been influenced variously by Hindu-Javanese and Muslim orders. Under the Dutch, the city was remade as a Europeanised urban centre complete with rows of Dutch-style buildings and constructed around a rational grid system with canalised waterways. ...
The dispossession of urban communities across class and racial lines is a global phenomenon linked to the expansion of international investment in the development of ‘exemplary’ city space. However, city evictions are also historically-informed and gendered processes which are continuous with past colonial and postcolonial urban rationalisation projects. Drawing on testimonies of women evictees in Jakarta, as well as interviews with public housing managers, this article details the gendered nature of the rationalisation of urban life in the context of a contemporary evictions regime. We argue that the rationalisation of urban space serves to sharpen the gender order by placing material constraints on women’s roles, limiting their economic activities, and defining them as hygiene-responsible housewives. Further, and in turn, the limited provision of ‘rusunawa’ public housing, which we show to be a gendered spatial and social transition informed by state doctrine on the family, provides the state with justification for dispossession itself. Finally, women’s everyday acts of refusal and resistance show not only that kampung forms of social life continue to be preserved in Jakarta, but also that rationalisation itself is a negotiated and contingent process.
The reformulation of Harvey’s seminal theory of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (ABD) has sparked a robust debate within the heterodox political economy literature. On one hand, there’s an argument that ‘extra-economic’ coercion should be the defining characteristic of ABD. On the other hand, Leitner and Sheppard have demonstrated that both forced evictions and consensual sales of land rights are integral processes of ABD. This paper contributes to this debate by expanding Leitner and Sheppard’s framework of ‘contested accumulations through displacement’ in two key ways. Firstly, the paper unbundles the postcolonial state and illustrates that its role is more nuanced than merely the ‘expropriation’ of land within the process of ABD. Based on theoretically grounded empirical research in the context of Sheikhupura, Punjab (Pakistan), the paper shows that the postcolonial state engineers new ground rents and facilitates land speculation through selective provision of road infrastructure, favouring certain areas while excluding others. In Sheikhupura, the uneven provision of road networks has enhanced the connectivity and accessibility of some places (connected villages) over others (isolated villages). Consequently, large landholders in ‘connected villages’ have been incentivized to extract high ground rents by converting farmland to gated housing enclaves (real estate development). This process has resulted in the loss of farm-based livelihoods and displacement for landless and small peasants. This illustrates that ABD does not necessarily require violent forms of expropriation in the age of neoliberal capitalism, as infrastructural development can lead to changes in land use, causing displacement and further marginalization of historically disadvantaged groups like landless and small peasants. Secondly, the paper introduces the concept-phenomenon of ‘economic-hybridity’ in the context of ABD which makes visible the dual and often contradictory nature of socio-economic and legal impulses in postcolonial social formations. Further, economic-hybridity helps in unravelling the intricate connections between place, property and power within processes of ABD.
The rise of the global supply chain has intensified the circulation of goods and capital across the world. While the body of literature on the politics and political‐economy aspects of logistical expansion has grown, little attention has been given to understanding how coastal fishers’ communities interact with the ongoing development of mega infrastructure. I argue that it is essential to place spatial and temporal specificity at the centre of analysis to further understanding of everyday resistance and resilience. In this article, I use a case study of the Port development in Jakarta to argue that renegotiating and reworking space and place amid the development of the mega port is a form of nonviolent everyday resistance and resilience that operates under, but also against, the capitalist political‐economy configuration. I focus on everyday resistance, particularly Asef Bayat's concept of quiet encroachment, and resilience literature to demonstrate the development and contested usage of micro and temporary infrastructures, both at household and community levels, as a material example of how diverse groups in communities exercise their agency and power, and express everyday resistance and resilience differently. Through this article, I aim to contribute to the broader literature on a situated political urban ecology, particularly on everyday resistance and resilience in postcolonial urbanism.
In this commentary, I respond to and extend Wilson and Wyly's ‘Dracula urbanism’ by drawing on feminist, postcolonial, and urban political ecology critiques of global urbanism. To do so, I firstly provincialize Dracula urbanism to reframe this notion as a situated form of knowledge. I then examine how vampires specific to Indonesian and Malay cultures might reveal different insights into the nature of capitalist urbanization. I close with a call for urban scholars to engage more closely with critical perspectives from urban studies that continue to occupy the margins of the field. I also invite careful consideration and reflexivity as to the work we achieve by coining new urbanisms.
Majority lower-income and working-class districts in the Global South have long relied on an intricate interweaving of diverse practices. This has been complemented by strategic engagements with the ambiguities inherent in governing the dispositions of land and municipal services. These processes of majority-inflected urbanization are being substantially constrained both by the restructuring of urban rule and economy and by the exigencies of climate change. At the same time, there are often undue expectations that grassroots movements will be critical drivers of urban transformations capable of enduring climate change. But the collective actions of many low-income districts are seemingly indifferent to such expectations. Both the endurance of long-honed political practices and their substantive adjustments are explored here in order to revisit fundamental questions about how to generate lives worth living without valorization of the human.
