Table Of ContentJakarta, Drawing the City Near
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Jakarta,
Drawing
the City Near
AbdouMaliq Simone
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis • London
Portions of this book have been previously published in AbdouMaliq Simone and
Vyjayanthi Rao, “Securing the Majority: Living through Uncertainty in Jakarta,”
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 36 (2011): 315– 35, copyright
2011 Urban Research Publications Limited; in AbdouMaliq Simone and Achmad
Uzair Fauzan, “Making Security Work for the Majority: Reflections on Two
Districts in Jakarta,” City and Society 24 (2012): 129– 49, copyright 2012 American
Anthropological Association; in AbdouMaliq Simone and Achmad Uzair Fauzan,
“On the Way to Being Middle Class: The Practices of Emergence in Jakarta,”
City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action 17 (2013): 279– 98,
reprinted by permission of Taylor and Francis Ltd., www.tandfonline.com; in
AbdouMaliq Simone and Achmad Uzair Fauzan, “Majority Time: Operations in
the Midst of Jakarta,” special issue on Urban Rhythms, Sociological Review 61
(2013): 109– 23, copyright 2013 the authors and the Editorial Board of Sociological
Review; and in AbdouMaliq Simone, “Cities of Uncertainty: Jakarta, the Urban
Majority, and Inventive Political Technologies,” Theory, Culture, and Society 30,
no. 7–8 (2013): 243–63.
All photographs were taken by the author.
Copyright 2014 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401– 2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Simone, AbdouMaliq, author.
Jakarta, drawing the city near / AbdouMaliq Simone.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8166-9335-1 (hc : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-8166-9336-8 (pb : alk.
paper)
1. City planning—Indonesia—Jakarta. 2. Jakarta (Indonesia)—Social condi-
tions. I. Title.
ht169.i54j3775 2014
307.1'2160959822—dc23
2014002380
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer.
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface
vii
Introduction Rehearsal for an
Urban Commons in Jakarta
1
]1[ The Near- South Between Megablock and Slum 23
]2[ The Urban Majority Improvised Livelihoods
in Mixed- up Districts
83
]3[ Devising Relations Markets, Streets, Households,
and Workshops
151
]4[ Endurance Risking the Familiar 209
]5[ Inventive Policy Integrating Residents into
Running the City
243
Conclusion Reimagining a Commons
261
Bibliography
269
Index
295
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Preface
I first came to Jakarta in 2006 at the invitation of the Urban Poor
Consortium, an organization famous in Jakarta for its battles with
the governor of the city at that time. UPC was a collective that tried
to be many things and avoid being many things at once. Part social
movement, part umbrella body for community- based organizations,
part militant advocate, it tried hard not to institutionalize itself in
one form as a way of addressing both the strengths and the needs
of the urban poor. Even with its focus on the poorest residents of
Jakarta, UPC was one of the only organized vehicles fighting for
urban change in Indonesia. But it always had to play down its repu-
tation for “going it alone,” for wanting to maintain the absolute in-
tegrity of its work, which in the end limited its effectiveness as an
interlocutor even among its “natural” constituencies.
I had been to Jakarta only once before, in 1982, and then just for
a few days. I was invited to work in a city that I did not know. UPC
fashioned itself as a vehicle through which poor communities could
advocate concerns important to them, as well as a means by which
they could valorize their own skills and contributions to the city. My
introduction to Jakarta was through its poorest, tensest, and grittiest
locales. While homogeneous pockets of poor residents certainly exist
in Jakarta, the majority of poor residents live in intense contiguities
with people of other social classes. Despite this proximity, diverse
groups often do not really “see” each other or, more important, do
not see their intricate interdependencies.
UPC was convinced that it was important for the poor to stand on
their own, that their presence was critical to the city, and that they
possessed determination and skills to improve their lives in their own
vii
viii Preface
ways without large measures of external support or technical assis-
tance. After all, much of the isolation and passivity experienced by
the poor, UPC claimed, was self- imposed. There was no denying all
of the ways in which the city waged “war” on the poor, undermining
their efforts to be full citizens of the city; yet, it was important for
poor residents to take greater charge of their own communities. UPC
believed that, given the several decades I had worked with the urban
poor in many African cities, I could be of some use to strengthening
their approach by helping their members document the ways in which
they survived and eked out some kind of livelihood, meager as it was.
But what struck me were the intensive contiguities of different walks
of life and kinds of residents. Unlike many cities where proximities
are managed through sharp segregations affected through the strate-
gic use of highways, railways, topographies, and walls, Jakarta’s in-
frastructures of segregation were more ephemeral and in some ways
more porous. Additionally, while it was evident who the so- called
absolute poor were, the demarcations and gradients above were not
clear, particularly in terms of having well- defined geographic loca-
tions. While UPC frequently engaged residents whose residences were
situated in particularly precarious circumstances and who were vulner-
able to imminent eviction, and, as such, may have embodied a more
well- defined marginality in relation to the larger surrounds, most of
the larger districts in which its members were situated were mélanges
of material and social conditions.
My work with UPC then was focused on working with residents
in eight different locations across North Jakarta, the part of the city
with the largest concentrations of poor people, to map out the local
economies and key power relations of the larger districts in which
they lived. In other words, the focus was to be less on the residents
themselves and their immediate conditions and more on the heteroge-
neity of conditions that prevailed in the larger immediate surrounds.
After all, many of these poor households were located in these areas
because they were close to work and other income- earning possibili-
ties. Many provided cheap labor and services to better- off nearby
neighborhoods. If these households were to more effectively appreci-
ate the importance of their role in Jakarta and more effectively mobi-
lize from it, then their relationships with the various facets of econ-
omy, politics, and social life taking place within the larger districts
Preface ix
in which they were located— in terms of administration, everyday
interaction, and more symbolic senses of belonging— would be criti-
cal. While some resident- researchers were bewildered by the task of
having to focus on situations that were not theirs, most engaged the
opportunity with great inventiveness and flair.
Up until then, UPC members would frequently claim that they
had little in common with neighboring localities, that their isola-
tion was imposed by the harsh judgments made about their presence,
their illegal status, or their impoverishment. But in this project, many
resident- researchers displayed substantial tactical reach deep into
neighboring locales, documenting the operations of key industrial
plants, markets, local government operations, criminal organiza-
tions, and public institutions. Of course, they often played with other
people’s expectations that they would be incapable of finding out
anything significant or troubling the operations being “investigated”
in any important way. But in order to do the job, resident-r esearchers
had to cultivate existing networks of contacts or forge new ones, and
so they indeed had concrete vehicles of movement accessible to them.
Funds were available for two years to keep this project going, and
participants eventually had to get back to their jobs or to their on-
going searches for new ones. But what was striking was that these
poor residents, often overwhelmed by the labor- intensive demands of
putting bread on the table and constantly confronting the precarious-
ness of their everyday lives, managed to penetrate the workings of
district life and ply a range of contacts and networks while having so
few resources to work with. What might happen if these individuals
and households had more resources and opportunities at their dis-
posal? As UPC, like many such social movements, experienced some
debilitating internal realignments and many participants moved on
to different efforts, I began on my own to pursue an understanding
of how intensely mixed districts worked. I focused on households
conventionally designated as the working poor, the working class,
or lower- middle class. In the early stages these were small investiga-
tions; I helped out graduate students at different local universities as
well as some Jakarta nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) while
“rounding up” collaborators along the way.
The subsequent projects have operated under the rubric of an urban
laboratory administered jointly by the University of Tarumanagara
