Jakarta: Taking the field seriously

We welcome this opportunity to reply to Prathiwi Putri, who several of us have met before. We respond here as The Jakarta Collective since the papers by Leitner and Sheppard that she discusses are part of a larger, decade-long research project involving other US and Indonesian scholars, itself undertaken in collaboration with a US-Indian team working in Bangalore. One of the great privileges of working in Jakarta has been the opportunity to get to know and learn from Indonesian scholars, think-act tanks and activists; we see this exchange as the next opportunity. But we also are grateful to the hundreds of kampung residents who have taken time out of their busy lives to sit down with us so we can learn from their experiences, some on multiple occasions. What we call “taking the field seriously” (Leitner and Sheppard, 2018; Sheppard et al., 2015), sharing these residents’ expertise with the Anglophone urban studies community, is our attempt to convey the multiplicity of voices emanating from Jakarta’s kampungs, and beyond. ¹

In her commentary, Putri works with several binaries: Postcolonialism versus neoliberalism, non-capitalism versus capitalism, agency versus structure, displacement versus dispossession, and individual versus collective action. In each case, she suggests that we highlight the former while neglecting the latter. As detailed below, however, we argue that these are more complex, dialectical, relations that we approach from both directions. This also means addressing interscalar relations; the paragraphs that follow work from the global toward the more local scale in order to tease out their complex interrelations.

While we focus here on those aspects of Putri’s commentary that directly address themes from our research, we begin by reflecting on her advocacy of a “critical realist methodological position” (Putri, pp. 4–5). ² Here we emphatically agree, notwithstanding her concern that we neglect the role of structure and collective political agency. Even where we report extensively on closely grounded field research, we have consistently sought to place such local detail within the larger structural and broader scalar context, teasing out how neoliberal global urbanism shapes events on the ground, but also how local agency has the potential to shape larger forces (Herlambang et al., 2019; Leitner and Sheppard, 2020)—the structure-agency dialectic. Our engagement with postcolonial scholarship also takes structure seriously: Whereas earlier cohorts of critical urban scholars highlighted the structures of capitalism (neoliberalism being the recently hegemonic variant), post-colonial and decolonization scholars emphasize the structures of colonialism. Working across these two bodies of scholarship, as we attempt, means recognizing that capitalist and colonial structures are mutually constituted—that colonialism helped make (European) capitalism possible (Sheppard, 2019a). In our view, recognizing how colonialism still fundamentally shapes contemporaneous capitalist uneven geographical development worldwide, and thereby local livelihood and political possibilities, is the basis for provincializing the conventions of mainstream/northern urban theory. ³

Second, consider our conceptualization of Indonesia’s political economy. Putri argues that our use of hybridity is at odds with critical realism because hybridity implies a contingency that fails to engage with “deeper contours” (i.e. structural processes; Putri, p. 5). We argue, however, that hybridity must be understood in relation to such contours. As neoliberalization articulates with place-specific political-economic formations this produces spatially variegated forms of capitalism on the ground (Peck, 2023). We use hybridity to describe emergent outcomes that exceed any variegated form of capitalism. Such more-than-capitalist processes (Sheppard, 2019b) exhibit agency, with the potential to disrupt capitalism’s apparent hegemony. Hybridity, then, underscores that the structures of neoliberalization are not a master concept for explaining all political-economic formations. There are other systems, practices, and logics rooted in other structural processes, such as Chinese socialism, that not only articulate with but also exceed neoliberalism. In short, hybridity highlights a real-world complexity that defies simple abstraction from and/or variegation of a “universal” process.

In Jakarta, neoliberalism co-evolves not only with long-standing, resilient oligarchic power structures (including practices of elite informality; Herlambang et al., 2019) but also with both state development objectives and contestations by the urban majority that include commoning practices. What Putri (p. 4) calls “neoliberal-feudal-authoritarian mixtures” represents only one recombinant configuration of Indonesia’s restructuring political-economy, existing alongside others that both include and exceed this representation. Indonesia’s post-authoritarian political economy has been characterized not only by efforts at deepening neoliberal reforms, but also by “developmentalism” and economic nationalism (Warburton, 2018), a broader process of “(re)developmental accumulation” (Doshi, 2019: 680) replete with tensions and contradictions between general interests and particular capital and territorial interests, and between capitalist dispossession and demands for inclusive welfare. Both elite actors and “the urban majority” (Simone, 2013) are enrolled in and reproduce capitalist practices, but they also can augment, contest, modify, and undermine these.

With respect to the former, as powerful (oligarchic) conglomerates have reconstituted their interests in speculative property and marketized public-private partnerships for infrastructure provision, political elites mobilize state resources to achieve broader developmental goals. Anguelov (2023) shows how politicians mobilize State-Owned Enterprises in “public-public partnerships” to support capital accumulation that they rationalize as benefitting national interests, while also attempting to provide affordable housing and infrastructure for urban citizens (often against the market-based logic of the Public-Private Partnership). Such hybridities, moreover, reflect a global geopolitical-economic “context of context” in which rising powers such as China advance alternative development approaches to Western-style (multilateral) neoliberalism. These interact to produce hybrid modalities in provisioning infrastructure (Anguelov, 2021; Colven, 2017). With respect to the latter, kampung residents enroll in speculative chains of rentiership (from investing in megaprojects like Meikarta to building rental properties–kontrakan—that accommodate the rural migrants building these) and accumulate wealth from private(ized) property, in ways that threaten informal spaces and livelihoods (Leitner and Sheppard, 2020). Yet they also reproduce commoning practices that support kampung livelihoods. In short, hybridity is far from contingency; our work consistently views and situates the urban process through a multiscalar and relational lens where everyday and structural processes are mutually constituted, producing complex actually existing configurations with multiple and overlapping determinations.

At the kampung scale, our collective has worked to broaden our understanding of urban displacement and dispossession, identifying different modalities of displacement and extending Harvey’s theorization of accumulation by dispossession. Putri critiques our concept of market-induced displacement on the grounds that we present those experiencing it as “non-dispossessed communities” that “exemplify resistance to the capitalist space-economy” (p. 3). Our argument is different, however. Under market-induced displacement, residents are approached and pressured to sell any tenurial land rights they hold to their properties. While they may be reluctant, broader structural conditions, the power of developers and land brokers, and the potential windfall gains together make it difficult for residents to resist pressures to sell. When they do so, outcomes of market-induced displacement often resemble those of evictions/dispossession (Leitner et al., 2022). Renters in such displaced communities are effectively evicted when their landlords sell and move (Leitner et al., 2023). Further, the individualized gains experienced by kampung residents able to accumulate monetary windfalls through their varied land rights are accompanied by social dispossession: The dissolution of social networks and support systems, loss of ready access to preexisting work and livelihood opportunities, detachment from place, and associated emotional stresses. Yet displaced residents display considerable resilience, working to overcome such social dispossession by re-enacting kampung ways of commoning at the new location, and maintaining social ties with their former neighbors through collective savings groups (arisans) and periodic reunions; this challenges the common representation of displaced residents as passive victims of structural forces (Leitner et al., 2022). We conceptualize such practices as forms of contestation, not simply resistance (Leitner et al., 2007), which we have observed in kampungs of all kinds. Thus, our argument is that Harvey’s accumulation by dispossession needs to be extended to encompass social and affective registers and individual and collective actions to overcome dispossession—proposing “contested accumulations through displacement” as such an extension (Leitner and Sheppard, 2018; Leitner et al., 2022).

Putri argues that we take “the wrong turn in provincializing critical urban theories by disconnecting kampungs from the whole social reproduction cycle” (Putri, p. 3 of MS). While we have not explicitly theorized kampungs as spaces of social reproduction in such terms, our fieldwork repeatedly shows that kampungs are spheres of community-based social reproduction. From our perspective, working to understand and document the view from kampungs and how everyday life therein is entangled with urban politics at multiple spatial scales shaped our move to provincialize urban theory (Sheppard, 2019b; Sheppard et al., 2013).

Across our work, there is a demonstrable concern not only for the “individual survival strategies” that Putri (p. 3) highlights, but also for the collective political action she suggests we overlook. Understanding kampungs as “collective political bodies” (Putri, p. 3) has been central to our intellectual project and our ethico-political commitments to working in Jakarta. Colven and Irawaty (2019) document how kampung residents work together to transform the city’s flood risk management plans, contest market-induced displacement, and collaboratively imagine alternate urban futures that are more inclusive of the urban poor. Analyzing the socio-technical networks that underpin Jakarta’s “gig” economy–now deeply intertwined with kampung livelihood strategies—Nowak (2023) discusses how collective action is vital for ride-hailing motorbike taxi (ojek) drivers. With the “super-app” platforms Grab and Gojek downloading risk and responsibility onto their independent contractors, drivers’ auto-constructed communities and social (media) networks have taken on critical socially reproductive labor: developing grassroots emergency response teams, social insurance programs, and community dues that pay for sick leave and vehicle maintenance. Such self-organized, mutual aid communities support gig workers materially, while paradoxically re-entrenching the downward distribution of responsibility for social reproduction under platform capitalism. 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 et al. (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 Urban Poor Network (JRMK) and community architects) resist state-led dispossession and advocate for rights to shelter, place, and the city. We analyze the different strategies and tactics pursued by Jakarta’s housing justice movement—ranging from confrontation to negotiations, signing political contracts with governors, and most recently participating in electoral politics—and how these have shaped such limited, but significant achievements as the community co-designed vertical housing in Kampungs Akuarium and Kunir. These different strategies also enabled selective rezonings of kampung land and the granting of collective building permits, providing layers of protection against possible future evictions.

Putri does pick up on Leitner and Sheppard’s (2018) discussion of kampung commoning practices–arisans, mutual aid food sharing, and the construction of shared green spaces. Such practices evidently support social reproduction, substituting for the failure of the state or market to provide “social reproduction systems” (Putri, p. 6). Yet far from “glorify[ing]” (Putri, p. 4) 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” versus “illegal” kampungs and city center versus peri-urban kampungs (Irawaty et al., 2023; Leitner et al., 2023; Leitner and Sheppard, 2018), and resulting inequalities in how residents can accrue benefits (or not) from urban change.

As Putri astutely identifies, such kampung struggles are intimately entangled with social reproduction—what Mitchell et al. (2004) call “life’s work.” More than a collection of individual households, the kampung is a space in which the activities, behaviors, and relations that maintain life unfold, both on a daily basis and across generations (Kusno, 2020; Leitner and Sheppard, 2018; Simone, 2014). In the tradition of social reproduction theory (see Bhattacharya, 2017), kampungs are also spaces in which the social relations of capitalism are (re)produced. We agree with Putri that, in wage-labor-scarce economies like Indonesia, we must contend with how this process extends beyond the wage relation (see e.g. Monteith et al., 2021). Indeed, we have worked to do just that by theorizing informality as a key pivot point in reconceptualizing urban theory (Herlambang et al., 2019; Leitner and Sheppard, 2016; Sheppard, 2019b; Sheppard et al., 2020). Informality is essential for social reproduction in the kampung, creating social systems for survival while also subsidizing formal wage labor markets. As Kusno (2020: 962) writes, “. . .a kampung is not only a spatial medium for internal group survival but an informal household of capitalism capable of reducing labor costs for capital to maximize profits.” ⁴

Our field research thus suggests that kampungs function both as spaces of social reproduction that enable capitalism and as spaces at the “raggedy edges” (Sheppard, 2019b) of capitalism enabling everyday practices that exceed capitalism. These two views of the kampung are not mutually exclusive. Neither, too, are experiences of loss and of gain: our research documents both the losses suffered by kampung residents, and their contestations of commodification (Leitner et al., 2023). Instead of “disconnecting” the kampung from social reproduction or “overlooking” its political potential, our collective research highlights the complicated, heterogenous politics that emerge from understanding kampungs as sites of both individual survival and collective action.

Finally, we insist on a broadened, more nuanced conceptualization of what Putri calls “the political,” drawing on scholarship that has enhanced our understanding of what constitutes politics (e.g. Bayat, 2010; Fincher et al., 2019; Holston, 2007; Rancière, 2009; Young, 1990). This scholarship draws attention to the potential for mundane, everyday individual and collective action and spaces to bring about new forms of social order. Our research finds that everyday commoning practices of kampung living that exceed capitalist logic, such as collaboration, mutual aid, care, and sociality, remain pervasive in Jakarta and its peripheries (Leitner et al., 2023; Leitner and Sheppard, 2018). Yet we cannot dismiss these as non-political (“merely the sum of individual survival tactics,” Putri, p. 1), because the stakes are simply too high. A narrowed understanding of political action risks having the effect of “giving emphasis to capitalism’s omnipotence” (Ho, 2005: 68), supporting the illusion that capitalism is all encompassing reality rather than continually emerging, hybridized, and more fragile than it seems (Gibson-Graham, 1996). Such an understanding would foreclose avenues for more progressive politics that emerge from the society’s social margin, a margin that is not simply dispossessed and exploited but a point of origin for social change.

Putri (p. 2) argues that our research misses “junctures. . .for deploying more progressive urban theoretical options.” It is not clear to us what such options would be, but we seek to advance theorizations that highlight both collective action in the traditional sense (e.g. Harvey, 2020) and more-than-capitalist grassroots contestations (e.g. Gibson-Graham et al., 2013). There is no question that capitalism tendentially colonizes its others through commodification, proletarianization, and assetization, as captured in Harvey’s accumulation through dispossession, and that social reproduction subsidizes capitalism by providing cheap labor and commodities. Yet capitalism does not only colonize its others; commoning practices in the kampungs, collective actions by the displaced, and state-capitalist approaches are important forms of contestation, resistance and modification, that can open up space for alternatives. Highlighting more-than-capitalist practices thus not only reflects our ethico-political commitment to taking the field seriously; it is also an epistemological strategy for stress-testing and reworking extant explanatory frameworks in ways that open up possibilities for alternative futures instead of just reproducing hegemonic imaginaries and practices.