EXTRAVERTED URBANISM BEYOND URBAN SPACE

The emergence of globalization coincides with the era of global cities. It produces the movement of
capital in urban areas that globally connected due to the economic agglomeration of industrial activity.
Urban governance appears to be explicitly extraverted with regard to how cities position themselves
nationally and internationally. Entrepreneuralism of neo-liberal governance dominantly affects the
urban area with extroverted policies to support the interplay of capitalist urbanization activities. In
particular, those activities will promote economic growth and urban-regional competitiveness.

Post-fordism era creates more flexible model of industrial activities to encourage various streams or
logistics networks, commodity chains, infrastructure, migration (workers), and capital, which
increasingly connect various geographic spaces around the world. It fabricates progressive
industrialization outside the urban area which is connected with the global capitalism. The concept of
extraverted urbanism should be interrogated because the strategic place in the geography of capitalism
that was originally located in the urban area has moved away from the city center toward the non-urban
areas (i.e. hinterland, countryside, wilderness). It will be argued that this condition makes the landscape
of urban become not the only area that can reflect the “extraverted phenomenon”.

In recent years, the central government of Indonesia has begun to monitor the flow of Foreign Direct
Investment (FDI) that has left the urbanized island of Java and has spread to the Outer Islands that are
dominated by non-urban areas. Industrial activity in non-urban areas such as Special Economci Zone
(SEZ) takes a strategic role in acquiring FDI compared to its major cities. We conducted analysis on
investment data in every SEZs in Indonesia which have a massive bundle of production area and
infrastructure investments. The results of this study indicates that non-urban area becomes extroverted
through intensification of its relationship with global activities. Furthermore, the process cannot be
separated from the role of central government in creating the strategic neo-liberal policies in non-urban
area. The central government has a prominent role in accelerating investment and development of
infrastructure networks through deregulation, privatization, decentralization and place marketing in
order to support global markets in non-urban space.