More than Jakarta: Other Urbanisms from Other Indonesian Cities.

Notes

By Abdoumaiq Simone
(for Rujak Center for Urban Studies, December 2010)

Urbanization has been conventionally associated with the formation and

functioning of cities. But in the past several decades it is widely recognized
that urbanization is a process that takes places across many different forms
and scales, of which the conventional notion of “the city” is just one. Large
settlements in the interstices between country and city may have large and
dense populations and be shaped by urbanizing processes, but they are not
strictly cities; just as certain places have experienced substantial population
loss or reductions in the diversity of economic functions and remain cities
only through memory or administrative designation. In other situations,
urbanization “spills out” from the confines of any individually designated city
to encompass entire regions.

Given their history, political weight, economic heterogeneity, population size

and global position, primate cities, such as Jakarta, inevitably become points
of reference for cities elsewhere. The problems and potentials of these cities
become compared to the primate ones. Even when these cities encompass
substantial population size, historical and economic importance,
assessments about their functioning and capacities too often are drawn in
the “language” of the primate city. As such the practice employs a
“distorted lens” through which to understand cities, such as Medan,
Semarang, Surabaya, Makassar, to name a few.

Jakarta is no longer a “city” in the conventional sense. Rather it brings

together and keeps apart many different processes of urbanization—one of
which is indeed city formation. But there are others as well which work
in countervailing directions, such as the shift of key production
centers to both highly concentrated centers and peripheries. Some
are global, as Jakarta’s economy becomes increasingly dispersed around the
world and a range of different interests, networks, and economies are folded
into it. Others are generated by the sheer diversity of Jakarta’s population
base, as well as the sheer plurality of different ways of life. Urbanization has
spread far across municipal boundaries and generates livelihoods based
largely on its sheer size alone.

Jakarta is now a mega-region, sufficiently large and diverse to accommodate

a broad range of agglomeration activities. These include the day to day
management of knowledge economies which require an extensive number of
manufactured items and services to create a viable corporate machine, a
massive formal and informal service economy, and a wide range of
production geared for both global and domestic consumption. There is a
wide range of forward and backward linkages amongst many different logics
of economic production, as well as a wide range of disconnected activities
that exist in a plurality of disconnected worlds. Urbanization has attained a
scale and character in Jakarta that cannot be comparable to the functioning
of Indonesia’s other cities.

This does not mean that the nation’s other major cities are any less relevant
or important in terms of thinking about processes of urbanization, and in
fact, they become the repositories of what remains of the scale of the “city.”
In other words, if we are to think about contemporary city life, then it is to
these cities which we must turn, rather than to Jakarta, to understand a
process of urbanization that may produce larger urban populations and
economies in these cities, but which are unlikely to attain the scale of a
mega-region. Given that these cities function at a level of complexity less
intricate and overwhelming to residents, administrators and policymakers,
they become the sites of important innovation and often enable articulations
between politics, economy, social life and history to become more visible
than in the mega-city or mega-region. Because the factors that need to be
taken into consideration in terms of assessing the implications of new policy
or program initiatives are usually less numerous than in a region like Jakarta,
it is sometimes easier to circumvent political gridlock in order to concretize
new governance and economic practices. A wider range of residents is more
likely to be connected across economic and political sectors secondary cities
and thus capable of experimenting with new relationships across different
institution and territories. These experiments can become incubators of
economic activity, transportation systems and governance particularly suited
to the secondary city and increases their importance as sites of productive
diversity and knowledge for the nation’s urban system as a whole. As long
as Indonesian secondary cities are predominantly seen through the realities
and imaginaries of Jakarta, it is difficult to fully appreciate their status as
producers of urban knowledge in their own right.