The present market building that overlooks the “Black Beach” of the surrounding street market in Tambora, North Jakarta was built forty years ago. Usually markets that have outlasted their functions are torn down and their staff redeployed.  Some 80% of the market interior has been vacated; the former tenants no longer able to pay the rent.  Almost no revenue is generated from within the walls of the market.  But the structure remains, as do its staff.  Each morning, a single woman unlocks the doors of the abandoned stores and drags out racks of clothing, arranging them across the public access ways.  The entirety of the collection could fit into a single store, yet the meager volume is distributed across the facility.  The clothes do not and will not sell; they have probably been in storage for many years.

During the morning and early afternoon hours the “parking lot” in front of the market building is full of sleeping bodies.  But around the corner on the side streets another market geared toward local consumption is in full swing, usually between the hours of 4-10 a.m.  By mid-afternoon, those in the parking lot will have received and arranged voluminous supplies of fresh vegetables and fruits, as the lot is organized into 180 selling units, which will work through the night, into the early hours of morning, generating enough visibility and perhaps income to keep the game of the market going.  A massive street market unfolds just beyond the frontiers of the parking lot beyond the “official” purview of the market authorities.  Regulations stipulate that the trade on the outside, in the parking lot, should be taking place inside—in facilities whose official price exceeds what any trader could afford, particularly as rents are coupled to a host of other “fees” and extractions. 

While the traders on the outside are exempt from prohibitive costs, they also operate outside most any official regulative structure that might apply.  The weak attempts at dissimulation—to make it seem that the interior of the market still is capable of generating income for the municipality—simply signal the operation of another game.  Major deals with big hotels and restaurants are put together to supply their kitchens with fresh produce, and, in part, these are brokered the municipality’s market staff.  This is something that their official job description would not allow them to do.  But since the deals come together outside the official trading area, in a parking lot where things are not supposed to be sold, they can legitimately claim that they are not in violation of the rules.  This is despite the fact that only this violation enables them to generate sufficient income for the municipality in order to keep the market open.

Again, the deception hides nothing.  It is simply part of the gestural apparatus necessary to convert the market into a phantom, where it can, as phantom, do much of whatever it wants to do.  Usually a key facility, business, or attraction anchors the dispersal of activity all around, such as famous building or monument, or even market.  The trading area surrounding this market continues to expand and become more central as a critical source of supply for a wide range of goods and services.  But the central building at the origin of the market itself does not appear to have any kind of density capable of exerting gravitational force. Squatters fill the upper stories and the basement which, when it is not flooded, is used to peel and shuck making the produce presentable.  Everyone knows that the official market is “dead”, that the real action is elsewhere, and for the traders surrounding it, they know it is in their hands. 

Talking to traders, truckers, customers, security guards, cleaners, brokers, local authorities and those that keep the traffic flowing, there remains some uncertainty as to just how much capacity does lie in their hands. Ironically, reference continues to be made to the market.  During times of confusion on the street or incipient conflict people wonder what “the market might think”, as if it still was some kind of command structure.  Even as power and efficacy have been distributed across a complicated network of authorities, unofficial regulators, and brokers, reference is made to the sentiments and inclinations of something that has been thoroughly hollowed out. 

 It is as if this hollowing itself embodies the multiplicity of potentialities entailed in a given sale, an additional seller added to the street, a revised supply chain, or an influx of new workers in the near-by textile fabrication zone.  Rather than influence exerted as a function of an ability to define and impose, whatever is left of the official market registers its power in the way it induces speculation, i.e. the ways in which traders, customers and neighborhood residents alike wonder what happened to the market and what is it “up to” now, even when the games it may be playing appear to be well known.  But no matter how much knowledge may be in circulation, the hollowing out of the market in face of a thriving everywhere around it continues to disconcert and prompt unease.  Even as the arrangements of power and money throughout the surrounding street may be crystal clear, there remains a sense amongst all involved that things are not completely settled.

While everyone has their prescribed roles, some of which are reiterated for decades, at times the important thing is find ways of operating between them.  In grappling with how residents in peri-urban Maputo navigate the acquisition of land in a country that still officially prohibits private ownership, eventually accommodates “newcomers” after many years waiting, Morten Nielsen (2013) uses Deleuze’s notion of cinematic montage to describe the dependency of urban residents on a temporal aesthetics.  As cinema neither adheres to linear lines of narrative nor refers to the same external surrounds, singular cinematic perspectives, distinct from those of any given actor, emerge in the intervals between different images as they crisscross each other.  Similarly, as Nielsen points out, the coming-into-existence of viable forms of social identity acts through the modulation of different social images, whether they are that of  “buyer”, “seller”, “broker”, and so forth. 

In a situation where the “central market” seems to continue an ability to control without possessing any of the conventional pre-requite components to control, thus instilling a pervasive unease in otherwise tightly defined market activities, the exigency is for individuals to assume no one particular role, but to act in the interval, precisely so as not to annul the incommensurability entailed.  For as Morten Nielsen points out, the incommesurable provides cover for jumps in “scale,” in how far specific actors might reach across the landscape of power-laden transactions.  These leaps may come off simply as a means to maximize opportunity at any expense.  But, they engender a sense of collective modulation, of give and take, of an ability for the overall constellation of trading spaces to “breathe”, to incorporate new information and practices and, as such, ward off atrophy and sedentary repetitions.

In Tambora, everyone has his or her business.  But it is not the diagram of business that compartmentalizes individuals in their niche markets and idiosyncratically tailored performances.  They set up shop, they have their products and customers, their graduated fees and rents, and for the most part, little expands or contracts.  The figuring of relations invites mapping both on paper and in people’s heads. The density of street markets is something familiar; it is a redundant celebration of chaos in circumscribed quarters; we know it will only go so far. 

The forward and backward linkages, the locational advantages, the platforms for reciprocal witnessing, and the proliferation of quiet calibration of entrepreneurial performance saturate the usual reflections. It is true that these occasions for the gathering up of things and bodies, for the thickening of externalities to accompany prices kept just lower than anywhere else are sensation machines.  They are ways of inciting purchases and generating hundreds of silent promises of future accumulation, as well as ways of coaxing something else besides the buying and selling.

But they are also the methodical, often mundane, instruments that aim for long-term stories, for an endurance capable of absorbing the pressures and pulls, the incessant anxieties about having enough, of having to implicitly share the burdens and benefits of doing the same old thing in intense proximity with others.  Whatever form the street market generates must be grasped over the long haul, in its ability to fold in and ward off, its seeming tolerance for accommodations of all kinds, but its equally stringent intolerance of things getting out of hand.

Even though the Tambora market has been operating for a half-century, it thrives today largely on the basis of the viability of the textile sector.  The market provides many different customers from all over the city with fresh produce—restaurants, hospitals, food hawkers, and households.  But importantly, it services the consumption needs of the expanding work force in Jembatan Lima and Tanah Sereal, most of which are paid very low wages.  The market provides them an opportunity to stroll up and down, gawk and gaze, converse and comment, and to see themselves in mass in ways that the mechanics of everyday work do not.  The market then is a device that brings the collective to a fore; it enables it to now envision itself but without the responsibility of fabrication.  Workers can observe themselves in constantly shifting aggregates in the stop-start flows of their looking at cellphones, buying air time, shopping for housewares, and drinking coconut juice. 

They do pay attention to each other as elements of particular fabrication units that have either prescribed or shifting relationships with each other; they do not witness each other as individuals of specific backgrounds or skills, emplaced in specific locations and rhythms of work.  For example, it is striking how often sellers along the street remark about how young most everyone is, how full the streets are with couples that they have never seen before, that come from elsewhere but quickly make friends with other young people, making the behaviors of the young who grew up here more unapproachable by their elders.

The older generation still invokes a particular story line as to how things are, and this line refers to one of the first railways connecting the city at Anyer to Banten, the most western province of Java and a place widely known for its mystical powers.  The area was initially anchored by a renowned Islamic boarding school and the businesses that grew up around it.  Older residents often make reference to trade-offs, where recently arrived Banten migrants shared secret powers with Chinese entrepreneurs in exchange for business opportunities. There are remnants of such deals, particularly in the ways in which the purported hegemony of Indonesian Chinese capital is tempered in this part of North Jakarta, long considered the domain of this capital.  Other Indonesian ethnicities in Jakarta often hesitate in face of Chinese economic power, finding ways to work around it rather than take it on outside of periodic explosions of violence directed to the symbols of this dominance.

The growth of the textile sector in Jembatan Lima and Tanah Sereal is usually attributed to the Indo-Chinese.  Given their capacity to mobilize capital at scale, Chinese entrepreneurs do dominate the most significant channels of importation and access to large machinery, and thus have controlled the major retail markets. While this remains largely the case, the main popular, low-cost retail outlets at Tanah Abang, Manga Dua, and Blok M have multiple points of entry. Additionally, the texture of the built environment of both districts is punctuated by a range of different “projects” which manifest consolidations of local effort that are not easily attributed to any particular identity.  They take place through the contributions of different actors with different backgrounds but for uncertain objectives.  Given what they have to work with, these projects could be considered massive undertakings, large-scale technical operations.

For example, in Tanah Sereal residents along two parallel roads, and the winding pathways that crisscross in the spaces behind them, have been putting up a building for the past several years.  Almost the length of a football field and now five stories high, it is a rudimentary construction, slowly being assembled by mostly voluntary labor as the contributions come in, some financial, some in-kind—materials, labor, and political connections to keep the project going.  It is a project that would inevitably violate some codes although residents are serious about it being viably occupied.  The building has walls, interior floors, and the surface encasement is almost finished.  But it remains to be seen what it will be used for.  Individual residents have no shortage of ideas for possible uses, and everyone agrees that it should not be a rooming house to accommodate workers, as residents already have turned part of their homes and holdings into this function.  Everyone agrees that the building should not be divided into individual apartments assigned to each of the residents that have participated in the project. 

The headaches entailed in assessing the relative monetary value of different kinds of contributions, assigning volumes of space according to the quantity of assistance contributed, or simply dividing up the space equally for all contributing residents are viewed as enormous.  In addition, there are no clear ideas what constitute the end of the project, at what point the construction will be over.  There have been discussions about different scales and temporalities of completion, about assigning specific uses now and getting them ready to be actualized and leaving other parts of the building more open-ended whose use would be worked out later.  There is also recognition that, at some point soon, construction will have to come to end given the onset of structural vulnerabilities that ensue when structures are not used. The conundrum brings out various displays of local power, who all want to declare the “defining moment”, but each instance tends to reveal an impoverishment of imagination which seems to act as an incentive for residents to keep on building. 

As the construction process usually proceeds at a snail’s pace anyway, the act of continuance does not hurry any irreversible horizon.  Discussions remain open, as the building operates more as an occasion for an insistent exploration of options and next moves most of which never materialize but find a way to the table.  In this way the building is a technical operation that connects residents to a series of ongoing potentialities.  Its actualization may mean that residents have to narrow their range of options, but actualization does appear immanent, and will then raise another set of conundrum and possibilities.

This is a continuation of reflections on the “life of urban forms” via Édouard Glissant’s essay, Black Beach.

Black beach is also the large street market in Tambora, Jakarta after the floods in the rainy season leave a black sludge across the landscape.  Getting rid of the sludge forces the traders, porters, fixers, police, customers, wholesalers, and cleaners to engage in new conversations as if seeing each other for the first time.  As the sludge is shoveled into burlap bags and shuttled out into reasons for new land fill, suspensions of eligibility are temporarily renewed, i.e. people say whatever they want to say to each other regardless of their positions or any other markers of who they are. 

This displacement of consideration of status, history, age, ethnicity, and gender reiterates what happens all along: That the market is run through devices and operations that, for the most part, connect and arrange transactions that can be excessive.  They veer off all over the place, threatening to bring in and involve all kinds of characters that would make it difficult to maintain traders, trades, and objects in their space.  Just because goods may be arranged according to sector or kind, just because specific costs are required in order to maintain a specific emplacement, or just because the density of participants and goods might suggest a necessary articulation, doesn’t mean that things will connect, or connect without incessant frictions.  Long employed protocols and actors exist to cultivate familiarity and institutional memories.  There are fixers and brokers who both create and tend to the interface among actions, greasing palms, getting tough, warding off intrusions, and doing their best to insulate a sense of integrity to the place.

This black beach, which largely exists as the remnant of the usually short-term interruption of sludge-like conditions, exists in an area full of seemingly incompatible productions.  The majority of residents of the surrounding districts work in the textile sector.  This is a sector made up, however, of hundreds of small to medium size fabrication units.  Some cut, stitch, re-cycle remnants, design, pattern, and color.  Some are family-owned and labored workshops, others are small factories run according to different hiring schedules, forms and temporalities of remuneration using different combinations of skilled and unskilled labor.  Some are components of larger and stable assemblages managed by a single or corporate owner; others are components of ever-shifting subcontracted arrangements.  Some specialize in particular articles or designs, while others take-on a variety of work that is available.  An entire gamut of production logics, labor markets, ownership structures, agglomerations, and niche markets are at work. Often there is a jarring incongruity in the side-by-side arrangements of production or finishing units that operate by completely different rules and logics.  The spatial array of units across the landscape follows no apparent order, and neither is one invoked or called for by most participants.  While the competition for skilled machine operators is intense, there is little remarking on disparities. 

The frictions that do exist in the simultaneous operations of different kinds of fabrication act to fabricate.  They make-up stories that everyone feels to be the case but for which direct evidence remains outside of anyone’s view.  For in contrast to the Tambora street market, most operations across the district take place behind closed doors. Signs are taped on the gates of what otherwise appear to be residential units seeking machine operators, the whir of machinery filters out to the street, and a steady stream of small trucks pull up and load.  All of these point to the fact that fabrication at particular site does occur. 

Some workshops, particularly those dealing with a constant supply of remnants and leftovers to sort out or refashion, often make little effort to block external views. But this is not a field of mutual witnessing and the concomitant recalibration of effort in some kind of reciprocal adaptation.  Still, everyone knows what is going on; everyone has the confidence to tell you how all of the other operations in the area work, even when they almost always are reluctant to reveal any details about their own operation. 

These stories could easily be reduced, as they sometimes are in other sectors and areas, to the domination of particular big men—e.g. the Chinese run everything.  But most stories give wide scope for the importance of various actors, times, and ways of doing things. Collaboration among fabricators may fall into specific grooves and long-term agreements; different units on their own would rarely attempt to articulate themselves in arrangements radically different from what is a highly limited series of forward and backward linkages.  But this seldom rules out the professed capacity or willingness to work with almost anyone if that is what is required.  Nor does it preclude an ability of individuals to provide detailed accounts of what could take place and how these possibilities would work.

Without seeming to have direct evidence, confirmed by mutual and amassed sightings, these representations of the sector then seem fabricated, products of individual dissimulation.  But in attempts to go door-to-door in the past years, to accumulate information from different workers and owners, and to try and put the pieces of the puzzle together, these representations appear to be accurate.  The fabrications aim for an inclusiveness of points of view.  They provide room for many different things to take place, and the stories fold in a wide range of relevant actors.  For this sense of inclusiveness seems to be inscribed into the district’s environment as a sensibility. 

The areas around the Tambora market where this fabrication takes place, most particularly, Jembatan Lima and Tanah Sereal, encompass an intensive diversity of income groups, ethnicities and backgrounds.  Such diversity requires a platform through which it can be sustained, and the inclusiveness of the textile sector, itself reiterated through the inclusiveness of the fabrication, seems to provide it.  Through its multiplicity of techniques and assemblages, as well as the continuous growth of the retail markets fed by its production, the economy of the district is able to bring in different kinds of participants.  As production in this area has grown in importance, turn-around times are increasingly important.  This means additional labor is needed to make sure the machines are operating, that material is loaded and unloaded quickly, and that traffic is steered as smoothly as possible through more crowded streets.

Urban consumption is a matter of shifting tastes and fashions. Cycles of popularity are speeded up, and different population segments negotiate their relationships to complicated cities through adopting particular “brands” or markers.  This is not only true for the middle class, but low-income groups as well.  The purchase of cheap goods does not necessarily mean the purchase of uniform goods.  The district has anticipated these desires and so not only produces for orders, but also experiments with different styles.  Conventional orders are also infused with different experimental samples to test the market, and through such testing also attempt to expand its own production lines without the mediation of other brokers. This, too, becomes an element of inclusiveness; something that combines standardization and innovation.

Such inclusiveness does not always work, and it is partly buttressed by the fact that these districts have long been subject to different forms of local authority and entrepreneurial power.  There may always have been the “big shots” with lots of money to throw around, but their ability to exert complete control was tempered by the different routes through which local actors could consolidate influence—via religious domains, the rough and tumble world of local politics, the articulation of local production to other sectors, markets, sources of input, and also critically, through the mobilization of labor.  Districts such as these in Jakarta have not only mobilized labor through individual hiring but through the enfolding of other institutional or associational relationships into labor markets. 

But inclusiveness can be interrupted through the parasitical and speculative actions of moneyed players, usually from the outside, that act to skew the distribution of production to particular and highly circumscribed groupings.  These players attempt to impose specific linkages among a limited set of production units, suppliers, transporters, and marketers limiting and undercutting the more varied and flexible configurations that otherwise would be continuously negotiated and worked out.  This is the constant struggle on black beach.

     In Jakarta the questions and struggles about where to put things remain open. This is something more than the imposition of the tools of particular interests and agendas. People have to make to a living, and they do so with materials; materials that designs and policies have tried to assign a proper place, just as people, themselves, are expected to know their place by marking a place with the materials to which they have access. But the questions and struggles of where to put things are more than a matter of the constant jockeying for space to make a living, although these supplementary dimensions may remain associated to the primacy of this task. 

     The piling of belongings on a street, the ranking of a small line of taxis in the middle of a crowded thoroughfare, the unfolding of a tarpaulin between trees to shelter an outdoor eating place, the circling of rats around scattered debris, or the hollowing out of a wall intended to shield a construction site seem to bring to visibility a sense of space that otherwise would not exist. However discordant, decayed or exhausted things might be, however little sense they might make in their proximity, they seem to lean toward each other, support the most outrageous and inexplicable claims, claims that their persistence make on both attention and indifference.  It is not just that there are aspects of things that remain withdrawn from any attempt to make them take their place in the relationships of the imaginary.  But there are also things that do not want to be noticed, that seem to want to be left alone in inscrutable contiguity with things to which no conceivable or useful relationship could be drawn.

    In Jakarta, the extractions from materials and their concomitant leftovers and waste are massive.  On terrain inscribed with competing layers of rules, expectations, claims, functions, and propriety, the interstices created by the limits of available management can be wide.  As such, the pluralities of instances that neither permit nor forbid provide provisional authorizations for how space and things can be used.  They bring space and things together in ways that could never be consensual. Relations among occupants, both human and non-human never shed their vulnerability.  If those operating in any kind of official capacity muster sufficient force, whatever occurs in these temporary intersections is quickly eliminated.  As urban politics increasingly prioritizes the rush to making things noticeable, whether it is deteriorating infrastructure, neglected populations, escalating violence, styles and fashions, it is important to always question the endurance of things positioned in particular incongruities, wild attractions and repulsions.

     How to keep these improbable juxtapositions going? The most likely and rationale response would be to simply invoke neglect: The city is far too expansive and complicated to sufficiently put everything into their proper place even if there were general agreement as to the terms of propriety.  With few exceptions, most mega-urban regions are characterized by a highly limited selection of zones that stand-in for nearly the entirety of a city’s efficacy and promoted self-image. Resources are over-stretched or misappropriated; dilapidation and misuse can act as hedges or as insulations for deeply entrenched interests and claims.

     Yet there are supple arrangements that might exceed these calculations of efficiency.  For materials, spaces, and people may come together, wrap themselves around each other, get themselves tangled up in impenetrable knots that can be erased only by expenditures of violence and coordination that for some reason or another prove too costly.  So Jakarta is full of different things that seem to “lean into each other” as improbable existences side-by-side.  Particular looks, styles of construction, leftovers of past projects, temporary initiatives to make or sell things all get tangled up with each other.

     The remnants of old construction—residences, workshops, sheds, circuitous that were situated along narrow lanes, dead ends, switchbacks so as to both avoid and accommodate different claims and interests—meet head-on with the vestiges of public parks never used but which bear the name of national heroes whose memory could never be affronted.  These meet head-on with the intricate constructions of dwellings whose unfinished upper stories are intertwined across pylons and wires and planks that act as alternative thoroughfares to those at street level.  These meet head-on with the massive vacancies of parastatal landholdings long intended for every conceivable development project but in the end simply make-up for interminable budget deficits. And these meet head-on with tightly drawn and dense quarters that now abut major commercial zones and hurriedly add on whatever rooms they can to available living quarters in order to accommodate low-wage service workers.

     Any particular space or instance may not have sufficient reason or force to stake any kind of long-term security.  But it is the “meeting head-on”, with all of the discrepant, bewildering, and frequently unappealing convergences of things and their arrangements that produce confounding visibilities and not easily decipherable story lines.  These story lines induce hesitation, even paralysis for those who might otherwise be convinced of their ambition to clean up the whole mess, to impose all the trappings of the profitable city.  Certainly tears in this fabric of intersections are made all of the time.  Feelings of the uncanny do not necessarily stop the big shots from firing randomly into the crowd. But as one kelurahan (district chief) told us, “ we could be making some really big money straightening out our territories and selling them off to investors. But sometimes it is much too risky to just go in and start new projects because you don’t always know whose prerogatives you might be interrupting.  Besides, the developers always like to make sure things happen without a lot of risk, and they want clear access to land and roads, but in much of this district, things are much too mixed in; it is hard to simply identify clear spaces to develop without interfering with the properties and activities of people you don’t want to make angry or don’t have a very good idea about how they will respond.”

No matter which direction I take from the door of my house, and no matter how far I might venture, there are always people standing, sitting, or lying still.  Faces marked somewhere between contentment and dejection, between a longing to be a part of something always just out of reach and a relief of detachment from the myopic conceit that human endeavor will overcome all obstacles. It is as if a space has been cut open to include them, still as they are, in no hurry to do much of anything, and oblivious to any resentment that their inclusion should entail some exertion of initiative, some kind of striving. Should their stillness warrant some kind of overview?  Is there really any need to stare into any abyss or to reassure themselves that thought is possible in face of a city wreaking havoc with their lives. 

After all, the accomplishment of the city was the possibility to attend to small matters—the profusion of small buckling, leaks, cracks, additions, and encounters.  These are the run-offs that skirt the operations of grand plans, no matter how greedy or generous. Amongst these run-offs, these tiny fissures in the fabric of the sense of things,lurk zones of indeterminate sovereignty and capture.  As Rahman, the guardian of a lot vacant for decades remarks, “I have never crossed this place the same way twice, for it is important that a person never get too far ahead of himself.”  For indeed, the problem of the entrepreneurial self has always been to anticipate the outcomes, always attempting to surpass the outlook which is there right now, and which the inherently destructive forces of the earth have and will dissipate at any moment.

What is this interval? This between of the immanence of intensive urban dysfunction occasioned by carbon, gridlock, and the homogenization of desire and the exigency of the redistribution of opportunity and capacity needed if any remaking of the built environment is going to work. Everyone seems to have been warned.  Few live outside precarity.  There is an abundance of things to pay attention to, and securitizing oneself against the profusion of vulnerabilities only entails maximizing risk, and seemingly the most risky of behaviors is simply standing still.  This is what then confuses the repeated refrain heard everywhere in this town: “the people are tired, the people are lazy”. 

Again, what kind of interval is this?  Lassitude, ennui, malaise, and anxiety do not slow things down as much as they mark the velocity of things passing by.  The impossibility of keeping up with the information that one needs, as well as the impossibility of resisting the seduction of pursuing the different angles and trajectories of sentience coming at you from all directions may tactically encourage a kind of fast-framing of experience—the whizzing by of events as to make them almost imperceptible.  So participation in the same menus, shopping bags, twitter chatter, lackadaisical couplings, and pharmaceutically enhanced convictions elongates a vast middle requiring little effort.  They are few barriers to entry.  At the same time, for the thousands of citizens milling about, standing around, taking the easy way out, and waiting out the periods where nothing much happens, what is being paid attention to is what Catherine Malabou has called “a more generalized landscape of memory.” In the apparent stillness of either fatigue, lack of initiative, or the desertion of imagination, distance is always misconstrued—the mixing up of the near and the far, and things are always being taken out of a context that never existed anyway. 

If the mobilization of souls requires imitation over and beyond whatever is to be imitated, then what is it that can grease the wheels of imitation’s possibility? If the city increasingly devolves into fractures and particulates, what might reawaken the sense of sociality may be that which seems on the surface to drain it of texture and intensity. Once, many neighborhoods and districts of Jakarta continuously revised their collective life through finding ways to relate the practical requirements of individuating residence, occupation, and household with a reserve of ideas, experiences, and potentials that came before these practicalities.  Still, they had to deal with themselves as “packed in” and “crowded together.”  The pliant technical operations that could keep people sufficiently apart as to register reciprocity and complementary action could be overwhelmed by this sense of crowdedness, where the implications and tracing of any effort could quickly disappear, get swallowed up in the profusion of effects.  So, at times, one thing had to follow another, had to be traced out, had to be made into a line, simply to see how it might be interrupted.

In many ways this is an overconfident world,  full of declarations and well-informed anticipation. Bleary-eyed early morning business lounges at airports can be full of the resounding chatter of marketers reciting their shorts and longs at break-neck speeds.  Accomplishment is performed with heightened visibility, rendering even the most petty and banal of failures near-tragedies.  The people are tired, Jakartans are fond of saying; they are lazy; they have few aspirations, and certainly do not want to make waves.  The cultural landscape is certainly dull, and consumption requires the new repeated in the same old way; consumers willing participants in the law of averages.  Thousands of jobs are simply decorative; they provide the appearance of necessity, but is clear that nothing would really change if the bodies were to disappear.  In this prolonged stillness, itself the product of a frenetic concern to simply stay afloat, what is to be seen?  Most everyone gets by—but in a city that is fundamentally broken, jammed up, coming apart everywhere, and then overlaid with the sterility of comfort. Still, initiatives and efforts of all kinds continue to be exerted, particularly in conditions where people are tired of trying to pay attention to what is taking place. 

This gravitation toward an increasingly crowded middle is more than passivity, more that waiting it out for something to come, more than an act of resignation.  For if the breaks in rhythm, the suddenly sparked interruptions, or the massive realignments of position are intentionally provoked or arrive from nowhere, they may travel very fast, like the old domino theory.  Yes, the people are tired; they are lazy.  They look to the length of beards and skirts, to the marks of devotion of foreheads and foreskin.  This is December, the month of the 13^th check.  And with this check more cars and motorbikes will be purchased.  The more crowded the streets will become.  Productivity losses increase exponentially.  Short-cuts of all kinds will taken.  Compensations for things not getting done will verge on becoming the predominant economy.  Stuck in-between work and home, here and there, a past drained of memory and a future drained of redemption, what kind of interval is this—these small cuts in the fabric of things, finally the suffering beyond sense?

When the streets are nervous or drowsy, you can sense it in the shops and among the people. It’s the driving force, the reminder that under the asphalt and inside the cement honeycombs, beneath the underground parking garages and behind every door, each concealing a thousand and one stories, the living essence of earth, fire and water remains.  Like a black angel of memory, most every tale, every occurrence finds an echo inside the walls of the barrio.  Old stories, myths, sayings, commandments, angry threats, advertising tips.  Carlos Zanón, Barcelona Brothers.

The allure of vulnerability, the deception that somehow troubling situations always have some space for you, the engager, to rehearse both the familiar litanies and the improvised impositions of new personal styles always ends up slapping you around.  The reeking need and predictable mysteries—all a play on the surface of things; the groan of the factory, splashing tires in front of all night convenience stores, cigarette smoke punctuating the urgency of those on cellphones asking for a little more time to get everything together.  Then there are calls of whispered urgency, certain of your availability, certain of their power to draw you in, partly because it is late in the night, little to deliberate, and the prospect of stepping directly into another world without tedious reflection or second thoughts.  The apartment door had been opened, not forced initially, but there were traces of second thoughts in the gap that the chain had allowed. 

It was a homicide and the caller was not among the bodies, stabbed way beyond the call of duty, a job completed probably no more than thirty before, liquid still running down the slight angle of the railroaded flat.  Smell of salt and bile, the pizzas that had been ordered for some eventual snack, the full-length mirror that put one at the scene, made you examine your own hands in case you missed something. But you have nothing to do with this, until now; you have no connections to anyone except the caller you went home with a couple of times but you don’t recognize anything about the place as being the place where you had listened to her stories of being made to transgress one border after another.  You have stupidly left your own shoe print at this border, generic as the brand may be.  It hits you suddenly that all of this might have been just the opening act, that the killer may have lingered behind, somewhere outside the mirror, and a phone rings down the hall, picked up almost immediately by whatever neighbor lives there, and you think that the entire story is being witnessed elsewhere as well, just as there is always an elsewhere that imposes itself on a scene that will in the next few hours be contained with yellow tape.

It is time to leave; it is time to never have arrived.  There are sounds at the bottom of the five flights of stairs, and so there will be no direct access to the street.  Walk up to the last floor and the door to the roof is bolted. You always heard Kinshasa residents talk about walking through walls and the ways that Israeli Defense forces read theories on rhizomes to make their way across hostile cities.  But the Kinois meant an often belabored, circuitous movement through compounds, bars, churches, alleys, and markets in order to accumulate layers of the sense of things, to compose a thick atmosphere around you so that you could slip through watchful eyes, guarded streets, and incessant queries as to whose side you belonged to.  The Israelis literally burrowed their way across the landscape with no respect for either the sense of things, their arrangements or uses.

Still, even in moments of a bolt in the door, the built environment can display itself as weak, gestural interventions into spectral matters reflecting the recognition that a multitude of operations, metabolisms, algorithms, and forces converge in any particular space.  A crawl space above the rubbish chute has been left unrepaired despite repeated calls for repair evidenced by chalk marks and loose metal sheets.  Out of the corner of your eye, you see a burly white guy in a cheap suit and tie trying to bound the stairs in time as if he had wings, but you are out in the rain, not sure how many roofs you are crossing or how many dreams you are trampling on.

It will be years later in Douala.  Along all the streets of “joy” where residents are bickering over space, setting up their small stalls to sell grilled fish and beer, others to preach the word, peddle single cigarettes, cell phone recharge, and cures for everything.  All kinds of police and authorities will try to re-do the arrangements or extract what they can from the meager profits, but everything seems to bounce back impervious to imposition. At night the streets are too full of braggarts and the exhausted, the chancers and the romantics, the gangsters and the hard sell of flesh and redemption of any kind.  Commerce and conviviality proceeds by some other memory, or rather, by the egalitarian opportunity for any memory to exert its appeal to the civil servant who has sat on this same plastic chair in front of Mama B’s stall for decades or the young girl who is taking her spot in front the eucalyptus tree for the first time tonight, to the crowds of congregants finishing a three day prayer vigil in the church down the street carrying their plastic chairs over their heads impervious to the smoke, sin, cajoling and conjuring running up and down with them on the muddy boulevard. 

You have tried to remain in the shadows these past years, the quiet witness, taking notes, sending out communiqués, and letting everyone have their own uncontested opinions.  And then you see that burly man, It is barely dusk.  The suit is long gone.  He has lost a lot of weight.  There are wide holes in the shoes, and the polyester shirt is full of stains.  He seems to want to call out your name, but clearly does not know what it is.  He stops several yard away, as if you are supposed to make the first move, surrender or run.  But you don’t know who he is, and he does not know what you have done, and it is in this gap that the black angel of memory will decide.

In Édouard Glissant’s essay, “Black Beach”, he refers to a solitary man who constantly paces up and down this Martinique beach at different speeds, never saying anything, but always adjusts his steps to the chaos—a metaphor for all of “the rhythm of the world that we consent to without be able to measure or control its course”; all of the commonplaces that produce a roar.  For what could the walker on the beach say to get to the bottom of things, to make anything understood?

Leaving the essay, the man is no longer on the black beach, or rather walks the beach in the city, the city where I live, Jakarta.  Here, landscape also shifts each day, often imperceptibly in the wear and tear of materials as they intersect, the wearing of building, road, wire, and the bearing materials have on each other in a constant struggle of orientation, of things impacting.  Unlike the Martinique beach where swells, erosions and winds efface inscription, our walker in the city leaves an array of signs—scrapings, marks, patterns of debris, spray paint, smears of blood, scrawls.  Neither their permanence nor impermanence is guaranteed, or subject to specific probabilities. Each may make some reference to the other, each may be different, point to different inclinations or readings, but there is no way to tell for sure. 

There is no underlying concept or motivation that posits them as dissimilar; our walker may be repeatedly conveying the same message or none at all. Repetition does not necessarily differentiate, nor does it form any unyielding pattern.  In the volatility of cities, repeating the same form or mark cannot be expected to indicate the same condition or sentiment.  The sense of difference is washed away, and this allows our walker to keep marking, to keep remarking on his efforts to get or lose his bearings. 

Remarking would seem to link the different surfaces that come to bear the marks.  But there is nothing in the marks themselves that indicate a story line. Walkers sometimes tend to assume that they are being followed and cover their tracks; the impetus to convey, to inform and to deceive can be equally present.  As a result, the contingency of any mark is intensified; it has to deal with many different things at once; it enfolds stealth and publicity, signature and anonymity; it says something about the specific place where it appears and something completely removed from it.  Any effort to zero in on what the mark is simply reiterates that it could be something else or nothing at all.

The technical operations of cities today are engineered in ways that attempt to continuously and more precisely survey what is taking place From roads, cables, pipes, engines, computer chips, phone towers, machines, fiber optics, pumps, generators, wires, gas, and the vehicles, bodies, instruments, and structures that direct, enclose, and expose them, and the calculations and powers that diagram their intersections, the capacities of persons and things are held, at least momentarily, to be viewed and further shaped.

These operations have been extended to elaborate ways of “seeing in advance”—of preempting dangerous activities through being able to recognize the incipient forms of danger, through prior scanning of and algorithmic calculation of behaviors across a wide range of times and contexts. So much production has been oriented toward making things visible and calculable—from cellular, military, information, and nanotechnologies—that technical operations are more and more associated with a determinant function. They exist to pin things down, to enforce cascading connections among diverse matters, and to reveal essential truths. Even more, the logic of preemption takes away the opportunity of individuals and groups to negotiate and contest the meaning of so-called truths.

On the other hand, Jakarta is a city whose marks and remarking are continuously altered or renewed in ways that can not only be experienced and interpreted in terms of many different probable futures, depending on the “supplemental tools” available to read them more clearly, but which simultaneously exist within the improbability of any definitive outcome. The city need not be anything for sure, and all the measures of income, life expectancy, resident opinion surveys or infrastructure assessment do not tell us what a particular district does, or what kind of mark it leaves.

Citizens, experts, outsiders can say all they want about how this or that part of the city is unhealthy, unproductive, overly crowded, or falling apart, but whatever is taking place takes place because people and things bear down on each other, avoid each other, or simply do what they do in their own separate worlds.  The taking in, acting on, seeking out, going around leaves it marks, and it is never clear how distant or how close those marks may be too each other; there is nothing in the passage of time or the characteristics of the location itself that can help us figure out an orientation for sure.

Where the unintelligibility of the terrain may prompt political decisions in order to “make things clear,” the realities of this improbable existence push back to make the politics of deciding things-as-certain more uncertain.  Of course districts such as these can be bulldozed out of existence, but in most cases they engender a certain wariness in those inclined to moved too definitively against them or to control them.

Navigating, selling, transacting, fixing, redoing, chatting, transporting, buying, watching, avoiding, greeting, driving, building, gathering, dispersing—all of these are technical operations.  They elaborate an urban environment whose reverberations of diverse, intersecting matters—agendas, concerns, activities, calculations, affective intensities, and compositions—make it difficult for any single set of actors to unilaterally restructure the textures and uses of that environment.  Whether property developers, municipal governments, finance capital, or mafias, the illegibility of such environments makes it difficult for any single actor to confidently assess the implications of their “moves” in relationship to it. 

This production of the unintelligible is no absolute guarantee against debilitating interventions.  Yet, across many cities of the world, it space and a time in which to rethink a range of possible futures; to build upon the resourcefulness potentially immanent in the wide ranging interactions of diverse people and materials within them, as well as to rework the relationships of these spaces with a larger domain of transactions across unruly worlds.

In the essay “Black Beach”, Edouard Glissant describes Le Diamant in southern Martinique, as terrain with a subterranean existence.  It is an ever-swirling, constantly shifting landscape of volcanic sediment, changing colored sands, indiscernible winds, falling rock and trees, washed up foliage and stone, and seemingly interminable backwash—a volatile, heaving place neither part of sea or land.  A solitary man constantly paces up and down the beach at different speeds, never saying anything, but always adjusting his steps to the chaos—a metaphor for all of “the rhythm of the world that we consent to without be able to measure or control its course”; all of the commonplaces that produce a roar.  For what could the walker on the beach say to get to the bottom of things, to make anything understood.  The beach lives in its right to opacity, not as a secret removed, but simply the excessive tracing of too many journeys and crossings of the flotsam of the world. All of the flailing, rubbing against, working through, clashes and caresses, promiscuous mixing and friction that keep bodies, times, memories, and cultures moving, without having to always take a reading of position or imaging the source of problems or potentials.  

In Langkawi, Malaysia, black beach is as a summation of the constant and futile efforts  humans make to deceive other things and spirits to relinquish their powers.  For there are always those who wait for the long night when creatures are the most vulnerable yet most attuned to the inexplicable; opportunists take their chances when the light wanes, but then skill is not something easily calculable or steered in the directions one might want. 

Black Beach was also the name of a small bar near a famous all-night bakery in Treichville, Abidjan, where restless autodidacts, prostitutes, soldiers, preachers, brokers, and drivers who made their living crossing the tense borders of a city polarized in almost every way imaginable would pass a time organized around the availability of fresh bread and pastries. Everyone knew that no one could be trusted nor was likely to be anything approximating the image of themselves put on the table, but it did not matter.  So nights passed in feverish speech, rattling the thick, lugubrious night with imperatives that never seemed to run out of steam, and as the proprietor’s refrigerator would constantly break down, there wasn’t even cold beer to add calm to rampant speculations as to what those gathered could potentially do with and to each other.  At moments, the convocation would seem to actually speak in tongues, completely indifferent to whether anyone could linguistically understand each other, and it was at these moments that deliberations seemed to take on a life of their own, with the clientele signing makeshift agreements on soggy napkins, exchanging money, telephone numbers, car keys, and wallet-size photos.  And as the smells of the freshly baked wafted along the avenue not yet dawn, the crowd would cross to the other side and in silence assemble an orderly queue to take the bread.

Much of what takes place in cities, as well as the collective capacity of residents who build intensely heterogeneous built environments and economies, remains unintelligible—beyond the abilities of existing knowledge systems and surveillance apparatuses to fully bring what takes place into view.  There are times when the built environment itself speaks to a capacity of which a continuously mutating collective has no available words to represent.  Often a willingness to suspend the important rules and practices are critical to sustaining them, so that the visibility of what people consider to be important in their lives has a direct yet invisible connection to a wide range of risk-taking behaviors and experiments that would seem to operate against the very bonds and moralities which people adhere to. The critical question is how residents seem to engage and use the unintelligible.  How the unintelligible becomes a condition for experimental engagements across discernible lines of economic and political territorialization, as well as social belonging.  

Steal away, steal away home, I ain’t got long to stay here was the lament of African slaves situated in-between the urgency to runaway and resignation that spiritual redemption was the only escape.  It could also be the lament of many urban dwellers faced with the immanence of dispossession.  For slaves the act of running away was always fraught with dangers, not only of recapture, but uncertain alliances with other marginalized people of all sorts—Amerindians, outcasts, vagabonds, felons. Hastily assembled kinships, “nations”, and roadshows sometimes managed to stay off the radar for long periods of time, but were most usually prone to betrayals and misunderstandings that prompted further dispersal. Still, there was always something fecund in the imagination of such constellations, amplified by the dense entanglements of bodies with diverse rivers, streams, bush, earth, animals, and foliage.  Here sustaining life was not a process of striving and fruition, but an intermixing of decay and generative forces, of inexplicable events and monstrous circulations.

If, as Anna Tsing claims, the plantation was the initial model for projects that can expand without changing their form and function, the contemporary spread of the megadevelopment—with its standardized integration of residence, shopping, leisure and services—is its continuation and aftermath.  The product is no longer cane, or any product in particular, except for the control of freedom—of the ability to control the process where life can become anything at all.  For the mega-development signals the end of the myth that the city was interested in creating particular kinds of persons, particular kind of life. 

Rather it seizes upon the conceit of self-generation, inserts itself as the machine that enables individuals to see themselves as, what Claire Colebrook calls, that which feels and knows itself as nothing other than self-affecting life.  Disentangled from diverse material and social environments, and stripped of the skills needed to intermingle with creatures and formations of all kinds that once circulated across urban spaces, residents must calculate their every move through constant exposure and enfoldment in proliferating networks, but where these instances of contact do not really affect much of anything.  Meanwhile, individuals are encouraged to “steal away” as much as they want.  For the only place to circulate is in abstracted, media saturated exchanges in capable of eliciting either desire or dread.

When people came to Phnom Penh as the failed Khmer Rouge laboratory finally ran its course, for most it was not really a return home.  Emptied of almost all of its inhabitants, the subsequent vacancy was also an erasure of claims, memories and orientations.  Shed of its intricate interweaving of ties, the recuperation of place had little meaning, and with no authority or records to back up them up, securing a place often meant uncertain alliances with those whose very continued survival rendered them outcasts of a particular sort.  The return to the city was then an extension of running away and the need to continuously revise expectations was only tempered by the initial period where the Vietnamese ran the city as a camp.

Under such circumstances it was understandable how residents stuck closely to family connections even when ridden with mutual suspicions.  Family members had to stay close to each other, but also at a distance, so this meant spreading out.  If, for example, a family needed to secure a plot in a not yet built up area it was usually important for them not to carry too many members with them, to be not been as trying to consolidate too much; simply to find a quick way of inserting themselves, staying under the radar as much as possible and scouting for other places to take a chance on.  This didn’t mean that consolidation did not take place, that securitizing family interests did not operate through various forms of expansion.  Rather, spreading out, as a means of consolidating family interests and ties, was also predicated on subjecting these projects to a process of being affected by those undertaken by others—of being turned around, altered, revised, and redirected.  Since not everything the family had was then staked on any one project, if things got out of hand, not too much would be lost.  One could always steal away.

Sometimes neighbors would silently agree not to interfere with each other’s efforts.  Still, at other times, residents would run smoke screens for each other—pretending that certain conditions, events or projects were not underway when they were in order to control how much attention outsiders paid to them and to ward off any harmful intrusions.  In all of these practices and strategies, more than one thing is going on at once, and often what looks to be the reality of situation is really something else.  People look like they are cooperating but in reality they are just acting as if they are doing it in order to win themselves the freedom to do their own thing; or conversely, people may look like they are running all over each other, stabbing each other in the back, pursuing their own strong-willed aspirations when in reality they are implicitly learning from and adjusting to each other, affecting each other without it looking like they are doing so.

The intense demonization of the poor that has been underway in Phnom Penh for the past decade in part reflects the inability of the urban elite to know what to do with all of the surreptitious, inexplicable, and, to them, monstrous circulations that have been at work in remaking the city.  A population supposedly traumatized by genocide and largely seeking refuge in spiritual quietude nevertheless has carried on constructing viable residential quarters such as in Prek Pra or Boeng Salang.  As the Gang of Hun Sen and other oknha go out of their way to prove that the Khmer Rouge were right about urban life—filling it with mega-developments of dubious economic viability—it is not farfetched to think about this demonization as a form of capture; a way of breaking up the circulations of effort and experimentation that have underpinned everyday efforts to resettle the city.  And this effort at breakage is not unlike a seemingly interminable preoccupation with demonic possessions, illicit networks, vectors of disease transmission, and dangerous circulations.

When nearly the entire population of Phnom Penh was rounded up and sent to plant rice in an intended agricultural utopia and eventually starved to death, few could anticipate at the time how pliable failure could be in suturing together the aftermaths of genocide, industrialism and modernity.  The young King Norodom Sihanouk—the ever-wily hustler of his own survival—had at the advent of his ascendancy been interested in the use of modernist architecture to cultivate the citizenry, and Phnom Penh, despite its over-cherished colonial relics, was proving a city capable of including disparate backgrounds and sentiments. 

The post-Khmer Rouge return to the capital after the slaughter of the most urbanized of the country’s population could never prove easy.  The confluence of the disciplinary procedures meted out by the “liberating” Vietnamese forces and approximations of a “free-for-all” resettlement process compelled both the determination of nascent residents to stay put wherever they got hold of something and the incessant negotiations and trade-offs of space—where the values of location, top floor, bottom floor, center, periphery continuously shifted as a by-product of the negotiations themselves.  Even though largely an economic appendage of Ho Chi Minh City during the early post-genocide period, and thus seemingly a budget drainer, the nearly 100,000 Vietnamese troupes in Cambodia set up substantial conduits for the evacuation of Cambodian goods, a situation now largely reversed. 

The speeding up of urban accumulation meant turning to the entrepreneurial networks of the Cambodian Chinese—and to this day, much of commerce mirrors the opaque transactions among tongs, clans, and family corporates.  With under-regulated everything, the city has proved a convenient place to park, blend, launder, and waste the resources of Chinese to Chinese synaptic conveyance—Singapore to Bangkok.  For example, in the thriving regional garment business, cloth is imported from Thailand with finished clothes largely sold back to the Thais—a process that also fuels the substantial importation of Thai processed foods.

While Chinese Cambodians could anchor their resettlement in proximity to wholesale and retail markets, creating a density of transactions that would then serve as a platform for their spatial extension across a growing metropolitan area, most Khmer residents were dependent solely upon their labor power, with even much of the urban service occupations dominated by Vietnamese, Chinese and Thais.  Securing a place in the city was thus highly contingent upon stabilizing a sense of place, concretizing claims of residence on specific pieces of land.  Since there was not official land market, no cadastral or official land registration system, these claims could only be legitimated through secondary markets and authority systems.  During the initial years following the withdrawal of Vietnamese “regency”, the United Nations agencies which entered into the governance vacuum were flooded with appeals to assist in regularizing land claims—something they were ill prepared and unwilling to do.

In the consolidation of political rule by Hun Sen and the nineteen families that basically run the country under the auspices of the Cambodia People’s Party, the use of land as an instrument of power dominated the urban economy—tempered only by the growth of the garment sector taking advantage of a range of favored trade protections.  During the boom period from 2002-2008, land prices in parts of Phnom Penh reached $5,000 per square meter.  Even at the periphery, 50 kilometers from the center, land prices were inflated and accommodated bizarre fantasies projects such as Swiss skiing chalets and Texas-style cattle ranches.  Poorer Khmer residents who had implanted themselves in the interstices of the older built environment, as well as around rails, creeks, lakes, and shorelines increasingly were designated as scourges and subject to forced evictions, often moved without any compensation to distant outskirts.

The dispossession is marked by an intensely punitive attitude on the part of authorities.  Residents who attempt to fight back, through protests, court actions, and proposed negotiations are severely repressed, as witnessed by the detention of women residents in particular from the disputed areas of Boeng Kak and Borei Keila during the past year. But these dispossessions are just one aspect of strategy of shrinking space.  From bus transport to beer distribution to pharmaceutical supply to financial services, urban economic activity is being swallowed by the extended families of the ruling regime, as citizens pay more attention to the frictions and intrigue in these families’ interlocking directorates than they do to constantly shifting window-dressing of policies and institutions that would seem to promise greater transparency and democracy.

For those with access to some resources—mostly Cambodian Chinese family networks— the circulation of information and impressions becomes increasingly important. For if households are going to accommodate growth in their numbers, as well as make productive speculative investments in future economic prosperity, this is going to be directed primarily to investments in property.  So considerations as to the most advantageous locations and circumstances are rife, as are the various shaping and manipulations of those considerations.

This process takes place in an overcrowded field of property development.  If an investment group, no matter its core business or sector, is to exert any traction in Cambodia, it must help enable some local power broker to enhance their visibility, which most often takes the form of inscribing evidence of that power into the built environment.  As a result, there are is a proliferation of “projects”—increasingly taking the form of apartment blocks, condominiums, commercial office space and, to more limited extent, adding to already substantial volume of Singapore-styled shop houses (that combine residence and commerce in usually three story constructions) and single family villas.  Among both local and foreign investors, the deployment of impressions, rumors, assessments, and speculations are aimed towards coalescing densities—getting specific developments populated at some scale.  Much trickery and dissimulation are at work, especially since in all but some rare instances projects are built quickly with few distinguishing features.

While the price of commercial property in Phnom Penh now averages at $2,900 per square meter, residential property at $1,555, and the volume of condominium space up nearly 600% in one year, the landscape of the city is littered with projects that are virtually empty, and if not inhabited within several years quickly become dysfunctional.  Perhaps the most famous example of this is the Boeng Kak development, which filled in a 90 hectare lake that was a critical aspect of the city’s drainage system, and removed some 4,000 households between 2008-2009.  Long-term use of the in-fill was granted to Shukaku Erdos Hongjun Property Development Co., a joint venture between Chinese investors and Lao Meng Khin, a politician with close links to Hun Sen. The official explanation for the removal of residents was that the area had become a refuge for terrorists, drug trafficking and moral degenerates.  With the exception of a small part of the lake acquiring a reputation for providing cheap accommodation to backpackers during the 1990’s, most households were working class families.

With few exceptions, nothing has been developed on the land; the managing office has been closed and there are few indications that anything will be done in the near future.  The environmental, social and political costs have been substantial, and yet perhaps none of the proposed hotels, convention centers and superblocks was even intended. At least the “terrorists” to be removed were not associated with any particular religious background, as the only newly constructed project underway is an Islamic center with substantial Saudi funding.

Depending on how well the cultivations of clients, impressions, and symbolic valuation proceed, as well as the concrete possibility for investors to access economic and political opportunities beyond the particular piece of real estate itself, some projects can legitimately claim to be sold off before their completion, while others languish in a state of bare occupancy.

It is for these reasons that representations of property markets are so ambiguous, so full of contradictory claims of success, The press in Phnom Penh is full of stories about how commercial office space developers desperately search for clients while others are barely able to keep up with demand.  All of this has little to do with the provision and functionality of space itself, but the appropriation of space as an instrument in negotiating a wide range of rights and obligations to do business, to be present, and to exert influence, regardless of the efficacy and often the deleterious impacts of the property development itself.  As a result, most residents of the city barely exert any sense of presence, particularly as they lack the resources to buy the rights incumbent in being able to make more than the most routinized and banal use of space.  Phnom Penh has thus in many ways become a success predicated on failure, a strange completion of the Khmer Rouge utopia.