Simone2UrbanGeo

On Provisional Publics and Intersections: Remaking District Life in North Jakarta

AbdouMaliq Simone

Introduction

For residents of cities, a simple question remains at the heart of their engagement withthe city: what can people do together and under what circumstances? What is it that people do with each other when what they do isn’t quite competition, collaboration,conflict, possession or dispossession? From this question stem the critical dimensions of urban policy in terms of who residents have to deal with, talk to, be intruded upon or intruding; who does space belong to, who has access to what kinds of space for what purposes? As soon as these considerations are opened up then a wide range of political,administrative and technical consideration about how cities are run also become morecontestable and specific.This consideration remains particularly crucial for those who continue to operate inthe dense and heterogeneous central districts that still remain in many of the world’slargest metropolitan centers. While it is true that many of these districts have beeneffaced and remade, or remain vulnerable to such, many continue to make significantinvestments in upgrading local infrastructure and diversifying local economies. Theyrenew important social institutions that promote cohesion and a sense of belonging.These efforts are sometimes undertaken as a kind of hedge to defer their vulnerability todisplacement, but more often reflect confidence in the ability of these districts to remainviable parts of the urban system. Importantly, while residents living on a block or in a1

neighborhood may have a lot in common based on similar levels of household income or ethnic identity, these blocks and neighborhoods are usually situated in a larger territory of often remarkable heterogeneity.The coordination of such heterogeneity—the sorting out of bodies, activities, andopportunities—relied upon local social institutions honed over the long run. Theseincluded religious institutions, unions, political, ethnic, and guild associations. Whilemany of these associations remain, they are often a shell of their former selves. They areunable to coordinate and cohere diverse residents who find themselves in a much moredirect, unmediated exposure to the complexities of urban systems themselves opened upto uncertain connections with a larger world of financial flows, commodity chains, political manipulation, and assemblages of expertise, technique, and calculation. They arelargely unable to deal with daily lives characterized by brutal celebrations of physicalviolence, the struggles for some space of operation that isn’t subject to constantinterference, and the rampant boredom of routines played over and over again. Suchsocial institutions are unable to deal with the many different ways residents makeeveryday decisions—increasingly haphazard mixtures of deliberation, impetuousness,calculation, gambling and prophecy.More precisely, even though instruments and settings of mediation may remain, thecapacities of these instruments to recognize or grasp discernible realities become moredifficult. In part, this is because the ways in which urban localities are situated in a larger world of forces and possible references are more numerous and unavailable to clear apprehension. So it is difficult to make confident demarcations of what exactly is to bemediated. Households still nurture, raise, debate, and discipline. Neighborhoods are2

replete with talk, discussion, and gossip. Reciprocities of all kinds continue to unfold;time and energy is invested in associational membership, and residents tend to all kindsof mutually recognized needs and responsibilities.

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Still, given the multiple angles and trajectories of interpretation and implication thatcan be brought to bear on urban actions, each of these instruments of mediation can besubject to challenge, or more importantly, are obligated to take into consideration a moreheterogeneous field of practices, associations, actors, and contingencies. On the onehand, this complexity can strengthen the resilience and the applicability of theseinstruments, but it also puts pressure on their ability to maintain specific terms of coherence through which they are recognized as distinct points of view or practices. Inaddition, urban districts are domains of conflicting loyalty, expression, subject formation,impression-building, and social identification. While this has always been true of cities,the intensities of countervailing claims and competitions over resources have probably become more pronounced.As Tilles and Hirata (2007) point out in their discussion on working class and poor districts in Sao Paolo, residents always have to re-adjust a center of gravity, re-align whatis paid attention to and considered urgent, valuable and important. This is because “thecritical point that today seems to have undone itself to the extent that it has emptied the political imagination that can’t figure out the world that isn’t in the terms posted in theimmediate present.” (186). Cities in the South do sustain insurgent planning practices based in various histories of anti-colonial struggles and urban social movements that havefought for citizenship rights, as well the destabilization of prevailing conceptions of citizenship (Miraftab 2009).3