Abstract
Keywords
Jakarta, a huge, rapidly growing, sprawling metropolis, home to 9 million people, is a city with growing disparities. Next to the rising front of high-rise buildings, shopping centers, and mega complexes, a mix of run-down neighborhoods, slums, and street markets is the living environment of Jakarta’s urban poor, who are trying to survive and endure everyday challenges. In essence, the question is how the vast growing middle class fits into this picture? How are ordinary people making a living in this fast changing city, in which disparities, different everyday practices, and biographies are closely interwoven with each other?
The book Jakarta: Drawing the City Near contributes to this discussion and what it means to live in contemporary Jakarta by telling different stories of the city, including its role as a city of different developments, politics, and policies. The book makes a considerable contribution by offering a critical view of the city as whole along with other recent publications in English (e.g., Kusno, 2013; Silver, 2011; Sumabrata, 2010) providing a complementary view by developing an in-depth urban ethnography.
AbdouMaliq Simone’s book encompasses a wide range of practices, and he reflects on diverse processes such as globalization, gentrification, survival, and everyday struggles. However, the book is not a collection of case studies drawing on one specific theme or describing Jakarta’s recent development in the light of global growth and local struggles. The book provides a good balance among political, social issues, and quantitative aspects as well as ethnographic snapshots. Moreover, the book examines potentials, possibilities, and opportunities latent in the city, that materialize through the daily stories of the residents.
Jakarta is a city with many faces and appearances, a city in which people of diverse backgrounds and occupations live in close proximity to each other, all making use of the same urban space. From the outside, the city appears chaotic, dysfunctional, and sometimes even dangerous. Simone takes the reader behind the scenes and combines Deleuzian parlance with rich ethnographic narratives. He draws on detailed descriptions of different neighborhoods, households, markets, and (religious) institutions to illustrate how the urban majority of Jakarta is caught between mega developments and urban slums, between the urban rich and poor.
For several years, Simone conducted fieldwork with residents from different districts, ‘shifting focus from the urban poor per se or exclusively to the residents of the areas of the city where the heterogeneities in social makeup and economy seemed the most elaborated’ (p. 6). As such, the book reveals how uncertain living conditions, contradictions, and everyday struggles are at the same time new chances.
The book is divided into five chapters that cover different theories, ethnographies, and innovative policies. In the introduction, Simone discusses the need for new ideas to reposition Jakarta, a city widely considered to be part of the Global South, because ‘terms as postcolonial, modernization, development, neoliberal urbanism and sustainability . . . do not quite get at the complex processes of urban change’ (p. 2). Thus, he introduces the term ‘near-South,’ explaining that cities of the Global South are not just examples of cities facing inequality, economic, and social disparities but are better understood as cities ‘near’ such connotations. He argues that this approach sheds new light on the processes, modes, and complex urban dynamics of the city, and how it affects its residents, and vice versa.
In Chapter 1, Simone discusses the concept in more detail and explains that cities of ‘the South’ are not just places of underdevelopment or catching up with cities in ‘the North,’ but rather cities with their own struggles. By testing and raising questions about existing models, Simone comes closer to the question of what cities actually are, how they work, and how they position themselves in a rapidly globalizing urban world.
Chapter 2 introduces the ‘urban majority,’ a term that considers the mix of different residents and their mode of existence living and working in close proximity to each other. Simone’s Deleuzian approach uses terms such as ‘assemblage,’ ‘multiplicity,’ and ‘plurality’ to explain that the urban majority is not just a group of different residents but a concept ‘that works and appears through incremental adjustments and shifting articulations’ (p. 133), ‘being stranger’ (p. 137), and is ‘performed on a day-to-day basis’ (p. 139). As such it is more a feeling or a state of mind than a fixed position in an ever-changing urban environment.
In Chapter 3, Simone draws on the concept of ‘devising relations’: people find out about themselves and their system by asking about the existing arrangements, materializations, and milieus of which they are a part. By applying different theories as ‘the lure,’ ‘the hinge,’ ‘captivation,’ and ‘the hodgepodge landscape,’ just to name a few, he connects different Deleuzian techniques with ethnographic moments that show that Jakarta is not simply to be approached through different theories, but rather the city becomes a theory itself – a way of reflecting, thinking, a way of life.
Chapter 4 seals the theoretical discussion by introducing processes of endurance, which are dynamic processes that hold both unexpected dangers and also opportunities. Individuals earn their livelihoods and navigate and shape the city by building bridges between new and familiar entities, and by overcoming frictions. Different rhythms, identities, and stories show how people ‘live with uncertainty and how life emerges from it; city life’ (p. 4).
Chapter 5 concludes by discussing inventive policies and ways to integrate residents to run the city because new approaches are needed to make the city work. Simone closes the book with an argument about the need for reimagining the meaning of ‘commons,’ because they are not a fixed set of goods but rather work as a dynamic setting that creates opportunities and through which people live, operate, and shape the city.
To summarize, the book shows that Jakarta is a city that offers no comfortable starting point for discovery, but rather has unexpected passages that can lead to unexpected encounters, adventurous surprises, and inspiring moments. Aspects such as anarchy, informality, novelty, and potentiality allow us to see the city in a new light, and realize that cities as Jakarta are produced on a daily basis.
However, one suggestion could be made and it concerns the rather long-winded theoretical approach for conceptualizing Jakarta as a city of the near-South. Instead, it might advantageous to portray cities just as ‘ordinary cities,’ a term introduced by Jennifer Robinson (2005) for focusing on the act of ‘drawing things near, of keeping things in play in a city whose horizons, like those cities everywhere, seem narrow and prescribed’ (p. 4). This is not a criticism of Simone’s ability to connect complex theories and detailed layers of reality, but should rather be understood as a proposition to keep the book, which sometimes sits heavy in its lingo, open to a diverse readership.
Nevertheless, Jakarta: Drawing the City Near offers a new way of thinking about cities and city life. We are asked to make sense of overlapping and multiple rhythms, circulations, and moments in time in order to create our own collage, which would show us that the city is never complete, never perfect, but like everyday life exciting and frustrating at the same time.