No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Practicing urban citizenship: housing justice activism from Jakarta’s margins
... Simultaneously, however, they also provide the socio-technical infrastructure for contesting worker exploitation through such visible political action as the large-scale protests by drivers throughout 2018 calling for better wages and legal representation. Irawaty, Leitner, and Sheppard (2023) document the long history of collective struggles for housing justice in Jakarta as kampung residents (working with organizations like the Urban Poor Consortium, the ...
... these practices, we have consistently worked to document the heterogeneous, contradictory and sometimes problematic nature of kampung politics: "Rather than off-limits to the logics of market exchange, competition and hierarchies, kampungs embody both commoning and competition, collective and self-interest…" (Leitner and Sheppard, 2018: 441). We have highlighted socio-economic diversity and gendered experiences within kampungs, the unequal conditions of possibility between those residing in state-designated 'legal' vs. 'illegal' kampungs and city center vs. peri-urban kampungs (Leitner and Sheppard, 2018;Leitner, Nowak and Sheppard, 2023;Irawaty, Leitner, and Sheppard 2023), and resulting inequalities in how residents can accrue benefits (or not) from urban change. ...
We respond as the Jakarta Collective to Prathiwi Putri’s constructive critique of Leitner and Sheppard’s research on Jakarta’s kampungs, to make visible the broader cluster of scholarship surrounding their research. Deploying six binaries, postcolonialism vs. neoliberalism, non-capitalism vs. capitalism, agency vs. structure, displacement vs. dispossession and individual vs. collective action, Putri suggests that Leitner and Sheppard stress the former while neglecting the latter. By taking the field seriously, we argue that the research of the Collective approaches these dialectically, teasing out their complex interrelations. Changes in Jakarta’s kampungs reflect its hybrid more-than-capitalist political economy, at the intersection of US and Chinese influence. The displacement of kampungs and kampung residents’ practices subsidize capitalism but they also contest its norms. Residents’ agency is significant; some gain but others lose, they act individually but also collectively. Highlighting more-than-capitalist practices opens up possibilities for alternative futures rather than simply documenting capitalist hegemony.
... On-site upgrading and redevelopment is now the broad policy position of major global development agencies including UN-Habitat and World Bank-the demolition of informal settlements without sustainable and affordable replacement housing is a violation of human rights. Previous studies and organizational reports have shown that on-site upgrading or redevelopment can work 1 Introduction when undertaken with significant involvement of key stakeholders on the ground, particularly the community residents (ACHR 2016;Dovey et al. 2019;Cash 2021;Dovey and Recio 2023;Irawaty et al. 2023). This report expands on these empirical insights and offers an evidence base for inclusive and sustainable redevelopment of the settlements on the campus, without consuming additional land. ...
The UP Diliman campus is home to up to 30 informal settlements that occupy
about 93ha of campus land. These settlements have occupied this land for varying
lengths of time, including the pre-campus period in some cases. This research report
sets the ground for a better understanding of the future for these settlements. It
maps the spatial extent and material conditions of informal settlement across the
campus and demonstrates the degree to which they are integrated with campus life
through informal transport and street vending. The settlements provide affordable
housing, cheap labour, transport, and retail services throughout the district. The
populations of these settlements are difficult to measure accurately but estimates
based on available data indicate over 70,000 residents. The report also explores some
possibilities for these settlements with the aim to open up conversations with key
stakeholders and to stimulate debate and understanding. The reputation of the University requires a just and evidence-based approach to the social inequities that are currently embodied in the campus. The future of the UP Diliman campus requires an effective engagement with the informal settlements to produce a humane and inclusive campus plan—a vision that reflects one of the core values of the University of the Philippines: “honor and excellence with compassion”
... While not appearing as papers in this special thematic issue, we would also like to draw attention to some of the work of other members of our collective that has been critical to our deliberations. Dian Tri Irawaty (Irawaty et al., 2023) emphasises that throughout Jakarta's urban transformation, kampungs have assumed centre stage in poor people's struggles for the housing justice issue. The battle of housing justice means fighting for the future of kampungs and the contestation over what precisely a kampung is-how it is composed; how it operates; and what its boundaries consist of. ...
In this introduction to the special issue on massive urbanisation, the collective that has prepared this issue reviews the thinking and experiences that have been important to them. The reflections centre on the use of ‘massive’ in Jamaican patois, where it has two countervailing meanings. On the one hand, it means an inordinate lack of sensitivity to the real conditions taking place, a sense of extreme self‐inflation beyond reason. On the other, it means a collectivity coming into being without a set form, but reflective of a desire for collaboration and mutuality. Massive urbanisation thus means here both the voluminous expansion of speculative accumulation, extraction of land value, replication of vast inequities and disfunction, and the continuous emergence of new forms of urban inhabitation, a constant remaking of the social field by what has been called the urban majority. All of the contributions attempt to work with this sense of doubleness, amplifying the creation of particular atmospheres of the urban as a materiality of its heterogeneity.
This publication is an authoritative volume on planning, a long-established professional social science discipline in the United States and throughout the world. Edited by professors at two planning institutes in the United States, it collects together over forty-five noted field experts to discuss three key questions: Why plan? How and what do we plan? Who plans for whom? These questions are then applied across three major topics in planning: States, Markets, and the Provision of Social Goods; The Methods and Substance of Planning; and Agency, Implementation, and Decision Making. This text covers the key components of the discipline.
This article critically discusses how Turkish migrants as an established migrant group have interpreted and acted on the arrival of Syrian refugees in Berlin from 2015 onwards and whether their responses have resulted in new spaces in which new contestations and/or solidarities emerge. To this end, it focuses on the processes and the ways in which established groups (re-)articulate their urban citizenship and belonging to a particular urban space in relation to newcomers. Building on the analytical framework of relational and agency-centered articulation of urban citizenship and drawing on research data collected in the Kreuzberg and Neukölln neighborhoods of Berlin, the analysis has two main findings. Firstly, Turkish migrants have been involved in solidarity activities and contribute to a more inclusive urban citizenship regarding Syrian refugees. At the same time, they perceive Syrian refugees as a threat to their standing in the city and their right to the usage of urban space. This results in a more defensive urban citizenship against the refugees. Secondly, the unequal power relations and local, national and transitional dynamics act as intervening factors shaping Turkish migrants' responses to Syrian refugees and the process of urban citizenship formation.
We analyse dramatic land transformations in the greater Jakarta metropolitan area since 1988: large-scale private-sector development projects in central city and peri-urban locations. These transformations are shaped both by Jakarta’s shifting conjunctural positionality within global political economic processes and by Indonesia’s hybrid political economy. While influenced by neoliberalisation, Indonesia’s political economy is a hybrid formation, in which neoliberalisation coevolves with long-standing, resilient oligarchic power structures and contestations by the urban majority. Three persistent features shape these transformations: the predominance of large Indonesian conglomerates’ development arms and stand-alone developers; the shaping role of elite informal networks connecting the development industry with state actors; and steadily increasing foreign involvement and investment in the development industry, accelerating recently. We identify three eras characterised by distinct types of urban transformation. Under autocratic neoliberalising urbanism (1988–1997) peri-urban shopping centre development predominated, with large Indonesian developers taking advantage of close links with the Suharto family. The increased indebtedness of these firms became debilitating after the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. Thus post-Suharto democratic neoliberalising urbanism (1998–2005) was a period of minimal investment, except for shopping centres in DKI Jakarta facilitating a consumption-led strategy of recovery from 1997, and the active restructuring of elite informality. Rescaled neoliberalising urbanism (2006–present) saw the recovery of major developers, renewed access to finance, including foreign capital, and the construction of ever-more spectacular integrated superblock developments in DKI Jakarta and peri-urban new towns.
This article examines how social movements based in poor communities make electoral alliances with politicians in contemporary Indonesia. Drawing on case studies of the urban poor in two elections in Jakarta, we point to a pattern of adversarial linkages by which movements present candidates with demands -in this case about housing and livelihood security -which are then distilled in formal ‘political contracts’. Unlike institutionalised relationships between parties and social constituencies in many democracies, these linkages are ad hoc, pragmatic and characterised by mistrust. In Jakarta, they involved disaggregation rather than aggregation of interests, with movement actors in the second election in 2017 seeking concrete gains relating to land and livelihoods in particular neighbourhoods, rather than a broad programme of urban reform, as had been their goal in 2012. We suggest that such adversarial linkages are a feature of contemporary Indonesian politics. They allow marginal groups to make contingent political gains but are compatible with prevailing clientelistic patterns, which limit their potential to promote systemic change. © 2017, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies. All rights reserved.
After Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973–1990), Chile’s post-dictatorial governments drew on market-based policies to develop large-scale subsidised housing projects and, accordingly, avoid the reappearance of mass housing movements. However, the considerable building of subsidised social housing in the 1990s did not lead to better living conditions for pobladores (the urban poor). To become homeowners, they began to be systematically expelled from their neighbourhoods of origin and relocated to segregated peripheries. This phenomenon has resulted in the re-emergence of housing protests in the last decade, which are mostly organised around pobladores’ demands for staying in their neighbourhoods. This paper analyses such a remobilisation process by scrutinising ethnographically the case of a state-regulated housing assembly in La Florida, a district of Santiago undergoing a housing affordability problem due to the generalised increase in land prices in Santiago’s Metropolitan Area. It focuses on how pobladores’ demands for the right to stay put in La Florida account for a broader reframing of right-to-housing struggles, expressed in the growing incorporation of right-to-the-city claims in their political language. In doing so, I show that current urban struggles allow for the rise of a type of urban citizenship through which the urban poor, by conceiving of themselves as city-makers, generate particular understandings of themselves as rights-bearers. This process of citizen formation, however, is paradoxical: although it is the result of mobilisations aimed at contesting market-based policies, it is permeated by a neo-liberal ethics through which the urban poor legitimate themselves as urban citizens.
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 of life on the most wasted of urban landscapes. The focus of this piece is Kampung Akuarium, a neighborhood violently evicted in April 2016 as part of a broader evictions regime in Jakarta under the governorship of Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, popularly known as Ahok. In the aftermath, Kampung Akuarium became the most restive of Jakarta's landscapes as residents returned to make claims for justice and compensation, and to remake their lives directly on the rubble of their old homes in defiance of the city government. Flanked by the preserved warehouses of the VOC, the ruined neighbourhood ultimately became a site where colonial histories, state- and capital-inflicted expropriation and ruination, and gendered forms of injury and struggle all found material modes of expression alongside one another.
This article aims to contribute to current discussions about “making cities inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable” (SDG 11) by linking debates that are currently taking place in separate containers: debates on the “global land rush” and the “new urban agenda”. It highlights some important processes that are overlooked in these debates and advances a new, socially inclusive urbanization agenda that addresses emerging urban land grabs. The global land rush debate has ignored not only the fact that large-scale land investments take place in a context of rapid urbanization, but also that these investments are often triggered by urban demand, whereas discussions on the new urban agenda prepared for the latest United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III) are typically city-biased, and pay little attention to the role of increasing cross-border investment in land and the transformation of the countryside. Using cases from areas where the global land rush and urbanization are simultaneously intensifying in the global South, we identify four areas that should be prioritized in current debates, namely the impacts of land investments on intra-city dynamics, peri-urban dynamics, and the emergence of new cities and new infrastructure corridors.
This article examines the relation between citizenship and urban planning. It discusses the debates on citizenship as theory and practice that mediate the relationship between the state and citizens, and highlights the crisis of the liberal social contract as the fallacy of its promises of equality and freedom are increasingly exposed. The article argues that the goals and objectives of planning practice are complicated by their formulation on a contested terrain of citizenship, and suggests that it is essential for progressive planning to engage with the expanded focus of the citizenship debate, from formal rights to justice and from representative to participatory democracy.
In this symposium, we explore how urban citizenship is about expressing, if not producing, difference, and how fragmentation of claims affects urban citizenship and right to the city movements with their universal, all-inclusive ideals. Investigating social movements, political participation and conflicting diversities in public space in Tel Aviv and Berlin, we see a trend towards a diversification of interests, a weakening of movements, and even a competition over rights and resources rather than a development of mutual support and solidarities among various groups on the pathway to a livable city. This tension, we argue, deserves attention. Radical urban scholarship and politics need to better understand the historical and place-specific contexts that structure the formation of citizenship claims and the courses that citizenship struggles take. Celebrations of urban citizenship as a more contextualized, community oriented, and bottom-up framework (in comparison to national citizenship) should therefore be complemented by a careful investigation of their fragmented and fragmenting practices.
Constructing undocumented immigrants as a security threat has allowed the US government to justify extraordinary measures that have pushed immigration enforcement increasingly inward from the border to states, counties, municipalities, and sheriff and police departments. The Secure Communities program, which integrates federal criminal and immigration databases to identify and deport undocumented immigrants, represents only the latest attempt. Most of the academic literature on local immigration enforcement has elaborated on the diffuse, ubiquitous and often paralyzing nature of the biopolitical power of the state vis-à-vis undocumented immigrants. In contrast, in this article, we focus on the contestations that challenge and go beyond repressive state power. We conceive of these not simply as a reaction to state techniques of power, but as productive and affirmative power that promotes alternative imaginaries and institutional change. As the Obama administration has sought to roll out the program to every jurisdiction in the country, it has been met with opposition from immigrant advocates, community leaders, and local law enforcement officials. Using the Washington DC metropolitan area as a case study, we examine the diversity of socio-spatial strategies that advocates have deployed to challenge the Secure Communities program and the articulations of alternative discourses of community and security. We also consider the broader implications of these practices for the immigrant rights advocacy movement and for theorizing resistance. More generally, the case illustrates the efficacy of and the challenges faced by civic activism in contesting dominant modes of governance and systems of authority.
This short conceptual piece calls for a careful rethinking of what feminist scholars have articulated as an expanded notion of politics. Rejecting the binary constructs of formal/informal, feminists have demonstrated the significance of community-based activism as an informal arena of politics and citizenship construction ae one in which women and disadvantaged groups are most active and effective. The present essay aims to extend that feminist insight by illuminating the inherent variety in collective actions that grassroots mobilize. The analysis offered warns of the risk arising from the literature's focus on strategies of survival: the likelihood of a bifurcated conceptualization of informal, community-based politics that distinguishes as "legitimate civil society" the grassroots actions and informal politics that build participatory democracy; and dismisses as an "outcast civil society" any otherwise patterned grassroots actions and informal politics, which are rhetorically criminalized as undertakings by "extremists." To elucidate that point, the essay introduces the interacting and mutually constitutive concepts of "invited" and "invented" spaces of citizenship, and urges recognition of the full range of spaces within the informal arena where citizenship is practiced. "Invited" spaces[1] are defined as the ones occupied by those grassroots and their allied non-governmental organizations that are legitimized by donors and government interventions. "Invented" spaces are those, also occupied by the grassroots and claimed by their collective action, but directly confronting the authorities and the status quo. While the former grassroots actions are geared mostly toward providing the poor with coping mechanisms and propositions to support survival of their informal membership, the grassroots activity of the latter challenges the status quo in the hope of larger societal change and resistance to the dominant power relations. In this neoliberal moment, when relations between the state and civil society are central to the project of state legitimization, it is particularly important to formulate an inclusive definition of the informal arena of politics. Such a realistic understanding should account for the fluidity of grassroots collective action across both the invited and the invented spaces of citizenship and acknowledge, as well, the significance of the invented spaces of insurgency and resistance.
Challenging representations of immigrants as victims of the biopolitical power of the state, and of citizenship as reinforcing such repression, this article interrogates how immigrant advocacy has been contesting the proliferation of exclusionary immigration policies in the United States and in the course of this pushing against the boundaries of formal liberal democratic citizenship. Using Washington, DC, as a case study, and deploying the concept of insurgent citizenship to theorize these actions, we examine the polyvalence of immigrant advocacy, paying particular attention to the spaces and scales of struggle and flexibly networked mobilizations. Insurgent citizenship creates new political spaces that exceed the national territorial framing of liberal democratic citizenship, that focus on civic action rather than simply relying on the electoral process, and that lay claim to new values and criteria for citizenship.
This paper introduces the concept of ‘ordinary’ to analyze citizenship’s complexities. Ordinary is often taken to mean standard or routine, but it also invokes order and authority. Conceptualizing citizenship as ordinary trains our attention on the ways in which the spatiality of laws and social norms are entwined with daily life. The idea of ordinariness fuses legal structures, normative orders and the experiences of individuals, social groups and communities, making citizenship both a general category and a contingent resource for political life. We explore this argument using immigrants as an example, but the conceptualization of citizenship extends more broadly.
full-text available here: http://dro.dur.ac.uk/9745/1/9745.pdf
In this paper, we propose a relational perspective on citizenship that captures the meanings and practices of citizenship, and their geographies in the contemporary period of accelerated and globalized movement of people across national boundaries. A relational perspective makes it possible to tease out both the complex articulations of state and civil society in the construction of citizenship, and the intricate local, national and transnational interconnections shaping contemporary state conceptions and social practices of citizenship. Using Turkish immigration to Germany as a case study, we examine the complex negotiations between state and civil society in the (re)construction of German citizenship law, paying particular attention to the role of immigrant institutions in this process. Drawing on an ethnography of Turkish immigrants' social practice of citizenship in Duisburg Marxloh, we show that they simultaneously engage with multiple states and public spheres to express their identities, and confront exclusions and discrimination at multiple scales.
Around the world, new spaces and opportunities are emerging for citizen engagement in policy and governance processes. Yet opportunities for participation do not automatically translate into spaces for change. Much depends on the power dynamics that surround and infuse them, shaping who participates, where and with what result. Building on previous work based on the 'three dimensions' of power originally elaborated by Steven Lukes (1974), this article argues that these dimensions or forms of power must also be understood in relation to how spaces for engagement are created and the places (from local to global) in which they occur. Understanding each of these - the spaces, places and forms of power - as themselves interrelated dimensions, each of which has at least three components within them, these dimensions are visually and analytically linked together in a 'power cube'. This framework, the article argues, can be used to assess the possibilities of transformative action in various settings.
This article shifts the gaze from the monumental features of COVID‐19 to its ordinary and historically‐rooted dimensions. It explains how COVID‐19 has disproportionately affected the urban poor in Delhi (India), Dhaka (Bangladesh), and Manila (Philippines). Five interrelated issues emerge as critical: the inadequate state support, urban exodus, unjust enforcement of lockdown measures, politics of unseeing and invisibility, and solidarity‐based initiatives. These overlapping factors shape the urban poor’s uneven experiences of citizenship in the time of COVID‐19.
Free access is available here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1745-5871.12495
This article explores the everyday politics through which citizenship is negotiated by diverse residents, analysing the case of Bansighat, an informal settlement in Kathmandu, Nepal. It focuses on both the collective tactics of the Nepali women's federation of the urban poor—Nepal Mahila Ekata Samaj—as well as the quotidian practices of diverse residents around water and sanitation. This analysis reveals the variegated politics through which citizenship plays out—reflecting complex interactions between wider processes of urban transformation in Kathmandu, localized socio‐spatial conditions of Bansighat and long‐standing social relations in Nepali society. The empirical findings help to make more explicit the politics through which some residents are able to capitalize and transform diverse tenure and infrastructural practices into a broader sense of legitimacy or belonging in the city, while simultaneously engendering exclusions for others. This article accordingly reflects on how broader class and ethnic power relations play out through everyday citizenship negotiations, generating differentiated experiences of citizenship for diverse individuals.
Much attention has been paid recently to land grabs in rural and urban areas of the global South, but relatively little attention has been paid to such activities in the third dimension—vertical space. Yet vertical space has also been increasingly colonized, as manifest in the transformation of mega‐city skylines through the proliferating number and height of high‐rises in both central cities and peri‐urban developments. We investigate how floor area ratio policies, originally designed to control densification, have been reworked to facilitate densification through floor area uplift. Thus a tool originally developed to advance public welfare has been used to facilitate the profitability of real estate projects for developers and to benefit local governments. Taking DKI Jakarta as our case study, we sketch out the coevolution of this policy with urban regimes, focusing on the mid‐2010s when compensation measures were formalized and made transparent. By using a particular project in Jakarta's central business district we show how the benefits of floor area uplift favor private sector developers over the local government. In a context of rapidly increasing land values, increasing demand for housing from an emergent middle class, and particularly the privatization of planning, this unevenness systematically favors the private sector.
This commentary concerns juxtapositions of varied spaces of citizen-authority negotiation within formal and informal politics. I build on the concept of juxtacity, as a productive articulation of contradictory realities and spaces of citizenship and authority, to reveal the co-constitutive and the non-binary spaces of action in insurgent movements. Focusing on a particular articulation of citizenship and authority that I conceptualize relationally as invited and invented spaces of citizens’ action, I highlight how contrasting spaces of politics can work co-constitutively. I ground my reflections in practices of subordinate groups as key actors in southern urbanism, namely South Africa’s township struggles for dignified sanitation (Social Justice Coalition, SJC, and Ses’khona movement), and Brazil’s homeless workers struggles for housing and land (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Teto, MTST). In their citizen-authority negotiation, these movements are agile, moving across invited and invented spaces as necessary to advance their struggle.
This chapter explains that the urban poor played a significant role in the protests that brought down Suharto. Then, after 1998, some organizations emerged that supported the urban poor in their efforts to reform their local communities. But there was no coherent movement during the New Order, nor has there been since. Instead, the urban poor have had to look after themselves, engaging in the politics of the everyday and using defensive forms of action to protect their gains and respond to impending threats. The most significant change since democratization has been the recognition of the urban poor as a voting constituency. Nevertheless, in the absence of a political party with a particular and demonstrated interest in the politics of the poor, activism in support of the urban poor remains fragmented and confined primarily to individual rather than collective action.
This paper studies local urban activism in contemporary Russia and relates neighborhood protests and urban citizenship to conflicts over housing-related public space. It situates Moscow as a cumulative space of post-Soviet neoliberal and authoritarian urban development and shows how and why Muscovites have opposed this development by engaging in local grassroots initiatives. The empirical analysis employs data from interviews with participants in two neighborhood protests against unwanted construction in their districts. It reveals patterns of active citizenship related to a rights-based approach to the living environment, the rejection of mainstream politics, and the building of new solidarity-based communities. Russian residents are voicing their dissent and building solidarity in their local living environments while innovatively navigating a highly limited public sphere and insisting on their right to participate in urban governance.
In the kampungs of North Jakarta, people make their lives in the face of a variety of transformations. While Jakarta has always experienced flooding from the coast and from its rivers, flooding is getting worse, and has dramatic effects on kampungs and their residents. At the same time, flood mitigation efforts by the government of Jakarta involve new infrastructures, such as sea walls and land reclamation, which interrupt livelihood practices in the kampungs and have led to violent evictions. Residents of North Jakarta’s kampungs must negotiate the surprise impacts of both flooding and the government’s attempts to manage flooding. In this article, we catalogue the social and material practices that support life and livelihoods in the contexts of these urban environmental transformations, drawing from fieldwork conducted in three North Jakarta kampungs and from recent critical geographical research about urban resilience and urban political ecologies. We describe these practices as everyday acts of resilience, reworking, and resistance. These everyday practices are social and material, drawing from and remaking social and material relations. Although everyday practices of resilience, reworking, and resistance require investments in social relations, we also demonstrate that the dividends filter through existing power structures in the kampungs.
This article considers the relationship between forced evictions and the ‘exemplary centre’ through an examination of three urban waterfront sites in Indonesia in comparative perspective. How is the notion of the ‘exemplary centre’ related to forced evictions and the aspirations of marginalised populations in contemporary cities of Indonesia? What are the chances of asserting alternative ideologies when a capital‐centric and modernist vision of the city as ‘exemplary centre’ dominates official planning paradigms? Competing visions of the ‘exemplary centre’ arise from distinct centres of power, from the state level to the grassroots community level; however, the dominant state vision of urban space is often internalised by those most at risk of displacement by modernist projects. Strategies to thwart forced evictions in riverbank settlements in Jakarta, Solo, and Surabaya offer alternative imaginings of the ‘exemplary centre’ – imaginings that enable the urban poor to visualise their hopes and to overcome the spatial uncertainties that characterise their everyday lives. While these efforts indicate resistance to marginalisation, they also provide a distinct kind of ‘exemplary’ vision based on residents’ own understanding of ideal city living. Concurrently, some alignment to existing ‘exemplary centre’ narratives is traceable in the effort to assert these alternatives.
This article explores how a major street vendor organization, APKLI, negotiated its political agency during the New Order and post-Soeharto eras in Indonesia. Tracing the formation of the organization to its current existence, the article argues that APKLI has relied on mediators - both street vendor leaders and others with close ties to the state, other organizations, and/or political parties - to negotiate for street vendors' recognition and support. It then describes how APKLI National sought to engage in electoral populism during the 2014 presidential election by promising to support a particular candidate in exchange for greater recognition and protection of street vendors. We argue that despite APKLI's attempt to generate an 'imagined community' (Anderson 1983) of street vendors across the archipelago, many of its own district branches as well as individual street vendors supported local patrons who would more directly influence their immediate future. Others did not want to support a single political party, and preferred to maintain a neutral stance. Copyright © 2017 by Sheri Lynn Gibbings, Elan Lazuardi and Khidir Marsanto Prawirosusanto.
Space Invaders argues for the importance of a radical geographic perspective in enabling us to make sense of protests and social movements around the world. Under conditions of increasing global economic inequalities, we are witnessing the flourishing of grassroots people's movements fighting for improved rights.
Whether it be the alter-globalisation mobilisations of the turn of the century, the flurry of Occupy protests, or the current wave of anti-austerity mobilisations taking place, there is a geographical logic to all forms of protest whether that be through transforming landscapes, occupying enemy territory or developing solidarity and communication networks.
Paul Routledge takes a primarily auto-ethnographical perspective, drawing upon his extensive experience over the past thirty years working with various forms of protest in Europe, Asia and Latin America, to provide an account of how a radical geographical imagination can inform our understanding and the prosecution of protest.
‘With vivid examples from his inspiring life as a scholar-activist, Paul Routledge fuses theory, practice, and passion—love and rage—to reveal the nuanced geographical logics of social movements in places from Andhra Pradesh to Zuccotti Park at scales from the body to the globe. A practitioner of ‘situated solidarity,’ Routledge incites and reports on the grounds of radical protests around climate justice, militarism, racialized state violence, infrastructural development, imperial occupation, landlessness, heteronormativity, food sovereignty, and social reproduction. Whether dancing, swarming, rebel clowning, marching, occupying, camping, detourning, caravanning, commoning, or sitting in, the spatial strategies of protest documented here are sure to galvanize social and environmental activists everywhere.’
Cindi Katz, Author of Growing Up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children’s Everyday Lives
This article studies political clientelism. In the first section, the term clientelism can be defined as giving material goods in return for electoral support, where the criterion of distribution that the patron uses is simply: did you/will you support me? This section includes definitions of vote buying and patronage. The two waves of studies of clientelism and the link between clientelism and commitment are discussed in the subsequent sections. In the latter half of the article, the discussion tries to determine if clients are swing voters or core supporters, and looks at the causes and consequences of clientelism.
City Life from Jakarta to Dakar focuses on the politics incumbent to this process - an "anticipatory politics" - that encompasses a wide range of practices, calculations and economies. As such, the book is not a collection of case studies on a specific theme, not a review of developmental problems, nor does it marshal the focal cities as evidence of particular urban trends. Rather, it examines how possibilities, perhaps inherent in these cities all along, are materialized through the everyday projects of residents situated in the city and the larger world in very different ways.
The inflow of African migrants into Tel Aviv's southern neighborhoods has aroused much resentment from long-term residents. Contesting the uneven burden sharing, which exacerbates already poor conditions at the local level, southern residents have aimed their grievances at municipal and national policymakers as well as the city's more affluent northern residents. In analyzing the contestation, this article challenges traditional conceptions of migrants as the binary opposition to residents of the host city, intruders on the shared and socio-culturally homogenous urban arena. We build on recent theorizations of urban citizenship as an agency-centered process to think through the ways in which city residents articulate their identities relationally and hierarchically against new and old ‘others’ and argue that international newcomers have destabilized long-conceived social relations. Using narratives of long-term southern residents, we illustrate how the uneven geographies of African migrants' settlement in Tel Aviv have (re)set in motion a process of urban citizenship formation by southern residents, thereby adding new layers of contention to what was already a highly stratified realm.
Since the first signing of the Schengen Agreement in 1985, Europe's borders have been changing profoundly. New actors, rules and institutions have emerged and transformed the character of the European border regime. This paper argues that cities play a crucial role in this process. They have become an important arena, where the re-categorization and re-scaling of spaces and borders, and the expansion and diversification of the modes of control and enforcement within Europe take place. These dynamics are contradictory, however, as examples from Germany and Italy show: on the one hand, local state agencies, as well as private and semi-private institutions on the local scale increasingly participate in the monitoring and in the enforcement of migrants' legal statuses. On the other hand, local actors and institutions are also carving out place-specific spaces of rights and recognition for migrants. This dual process turns the urban realm into a conflictive site of negotiating, shaping and interconnecting local practices of border control and urban citizenship, and in effect renders European cities an uneven landscape of urban borderspaces.
The rise of the nation-state has meant a disempowerment of cities as autonomous polities. This paper argues that urban citizenship should be freed from constraints imposed by national and state-centered conceptions of political community. The focus of the argument is on constitutional politics that would strengthen local self-government by redefining boundaries, membership and rights at the level of municipal polities. Reforms along these lines would strive to reunite cities with their peripheries in common jurisdictions; to mitigate the political impact of residential segregation through representation of urban districts in citywide decision-making bodies; to challenge national monopolies in immigration, trade and foreign policy; to establish a formal status of local citizenship that is based on residence and disconnected from nationality; and would allow for multiple local citizenship and voting rights within and across national borders. The conclusion suggests that an urban citizenship that has been emancipated from imperatives of national sovereignty and homogeneity may become a homebase for cosmopolitan democracy.
Displacement has been at the centre of heated analytical and political debates over gentrification and urban change for almost 40 years. A new generation of quantitative research has provided new evidence of the limited (and sometimes counter-intuitive) extent of displacement, supporting broader theoretical and political arguments favouring mixed-income redevelopment and other forms of gentrification. This paper offers a critical challenge to this interpretation, drawing on evidence from a mixed-methods study of gentrification and displacement in New York City. Quantitative analysis of the New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey indicates that displacement is a limited yet crucial indicator of the deepening class polarisation of urban housing markets; moreover, the main buffers against gentrification-induced displacement of the poor (public housing and rent regulation) are precisely those kinds of market interventions that are being challenged by advocates of gentrification and dismantled by policy-makers. Qualitative analysis based on interviews with community organisers and residents documents the continued political salience of displacement and reveals an increasingly sophisticated and creative array of methods used to resist displacement in a policy climate emphasising selective deregulation and market-oriented social policy.
This article joins many contemporary activists and scholars in criticizing and seeking alternatives to the ongoing neoliberalization of the global political economy. It sets out two main arguments: (1) in order to resist the growing control of capital over the global political economy, one important project is to develop new notions of citizenship that expand the decision-making control of citizens; and (2) Henri Lefebvre's concept of 'the right to the city' is one particularly fertile set of principles on which to base such alternative citizenships because it resists and rethinks both traditional citizenship forms and capitalist social relations. The first part of the article outlines the context in which Lefebvre's ideas might be pursued by examining the contemporary destabilization of traditional citizenship and its relationship to global political and economic restructuring. The second part of the article develops more specifically the potential of Lefebvrian citizenship by constructing a theoretical sketch of one possible citizenship based on Lefebvre's idea: what I call the right to the global city. The article finishes by suggesting that the right to the city can be extended beyond the urban context. It points toward a new set of more democratic political relationships in which the power of inhabitants to shape the global political economy displaces the power of capital and the nation-state. Copyright Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003.
Popular Mobilization and the Politics of Informality
- C Bénit-Gbaffou
- S Oldfield
- Bénit-Gbaffou C.
Bénit-Gbaffou, C., and S. Oldfield. 2014.
"Popular Mobilization and the Politics of
Informality." In The Routledge Handbook
on Cities of the Global South, edited by S.
Voice and Values: UPC’s First Five Years
- D Chandrakirana
- M Kusumawijaya
- Chandrakirana D.
Chandrakirana, D., and M. Kusumawijaya.
2003. Voice and Values: UPC's First Five Years.
Jakarta: Internal Archives.
Jakarta's Kampungs: Their History and Contested Future
- D T Irawaty
- Irawaty D. T.
Irawaty, D. T. 2018. Jakarta's Kampungs: Their
History and Contested Future. MA Thesis.
Los Angeles.: University of California.
Kampung Demolition in Jakarta: 1970-2009
- L Jellinek
- A T Nainggolan
Jellinek, L., and A. T. Nainggolan. 2011.
"Kampung Demolition in Jakarta: 1970-2009."
Kampung Perkotaan Indonesia: Kajian
Historis-Antropologis atas Kesenjangan
Sosial dan Ruang Kota.
Ecological Security for Whom? The Politics of Flood Alleviation and Urban Environmental Justice in Jakarta, Indonesia
- H Leitner
- E Colven
- E Sheppard
- Leitner H.
Leitner, H., E. Colven, and E. Sheppard.
2017. "Ecological Security for Whom?
The Politics of Flood Alleviation and
Urban Environmental Justice in Jakarta,
Indonesia." In The Routledge Companion to
the Environmental Humanities, edited by U.
Heise, J. Christenson, and M. Neimann,
210-221. London: Routledge.
Grassroots Struggle for Housing Justice in Indonesia
- D T Irawaty
- Irawaty D. T.
Irawaty, D. T. 2023. Grassroots Struggle for
Housing Justice in Indonesia. PhD Thesis.
Los Angeles.: University of California.
Atas Nama Pembangunan: Laporan Penggusuran Paksa di Wilayah DKI Jakarta tahun
- Lbh Jakarta
LBH Jakarta. 2015. Atas Nama Pembangunan:
Laporan Penggusuran Paksa di Wilayah DKI
Jakarta tahun 2015.
Housing Justice in Unequal Cities
- Roy A.
Roy, A., and H. Malson, eds. 2019. Housing
Justice in Unequal Cities. Los Angeles:
Institute on Inequality and Democracy.
Luskin School, UCLA.
Juggling While Claiming Rights: The Urban Poor Community in North Jakarta
- A Savirani
- E Saidi
- Savirani A.
Savirani, A., and E. Saidi. 2017. "Juggling
While Claiming Rights: The Urban Poor
Community in North Jakarta." In Politics of
Citizenship in Indonesia, edited by E. Hiariej,
and K. Stokke, 133-150. Jakarta: Yayasan
Pustaka Obor Indonesia.
Seperti Puing: Laporan Penggusuran Paksa di Wilayah DKI Jakarta tahun
- Lbh Jakarta
LBH Jakarta. 2016. Seperti Puing: Laporan
Penggusuran Paksa di Wilayah DKI Jakarta
tahun 2016.
The Production of Space
- H Lefebvre
- Lefebvre H.
Lefebvre, H. 1991. The Production of Space.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Condemned Communities Forced Evictions in Jakarta
- B Sheppard
- Sheppard B.
Sheppard, B. 2006. Condemned Communities
Forced Evictions in Jakarta. Vol. 18, No. 10.
New York City: Human Rights Watch.
Residents Withdraw Lawsuit Against Administration.” Accessed
- C Wijaya
Wijaya, C. 2018. "Residents Withdraw Lawsuit
Against Administration." Accessed 30 March,
2022. https://www.thejakartapost.com/
news/2018/06/27/residents-withdrawlawsuit-against-administration.html.