In the last post, a colleague of mine, Bahwani, has been talking about life today in his Jakarta district.  The following is the final part of his reflections:

     This doesn’t mean that people don’t help each other out.  You see that warung (small shop) across the street, the woman there couldn’t feed her kids if she didn’t have some good connections at Jatinegara ( a major market) so she can keep her prices low, especially with all the Indomarts and 7-11’s coming in.  Around here something is always going wrong; we all think we can fix things, and sometimes we can, but sometimes we get ourselves into more trouble, so people have to step in; still, you have to show that you are not afraid of letting things be what they are.  This place is never going to be the promised land; it has been comfortable to us because we didn’t have to break our backs trying to keep things going. Look at this street, look at how many new things are being built up, but none of them are hi-so (high society) type things; people are doing things that are just enough for them now; but they can do them because this is a not place where things are now set in stone; all of these people, they made their connections, they put their money together, and they can do things, even I know for a fact that they don’t have certificates and formal permission. You may hear some complaints now and then, but they’re on their own, and even those complaining are not going to challenge that.  You see, there is a lot things going on in a place like this; it might not seem that way, but there are a lot of different interests and goals, so it would never be easy even when the big money people bring in suitcases full of cash.  That’s why it’s good that some of the Betawi that were here are already gone; those of who have stayed have gotten to know the tricks that outsiders want to play on us. 

      Yes, so we came to this place alone, even though our neighbors before (in Angke,North Jakarta) were our neighbors here.  We don’t expect much from each other, but maybe that is why we can get along.  I know people are going to do what they are going to do, but this way, I can at least hear them miles a way; I can feel when a bad wind is coming, so I can step in another direction, let it pass; the thing here is that people have to keep their eyes and ears open, and this is not going to happen if people get too tied down expecting things or getting disappointed when they don’t happen.  I may not be as smart as the next person, but I can come up with the words or connections necessary to put a little extra on the table when I see something that others around me may not, and around here, as long as you don’t interfere, a little curiosity and interest can go a long way. 

    Everyone is putting themselves on the line; it’s not easy to have a project that probably won’t succeed, so if you can offer a bridge to something that person had considered, well, that’s like a line of credit at the bank.  Maybe they’ll offer something to you next time, but even if they don’t, that’s not important; this is not about obligations; we are in this place alone.  Alright, we’re part of things, we’re part of this place, but things sometimes go so fast in front of my eyes that I can’t always say exactly what I am a part of, other than that this is my land, my house, and I am comfortable with it, and besides, where I am going to go.  All this around this place, all of these big buildings, even if it coming, even if it is going to get rid of us, for now, it keeps us from being too exposed; that’s why some of these newcomers like this place; no one is paying too much attention, even though we spend most of time looking at what goes on around us.

As I indicated in my last post, I wanted to share some reflections of a colleague, Bahwani.  He is a resident of Menteng Dalam, a district in central Jakarta—a district that borders some of the largest new mega-block developments in the world.  Here, he speaks of the practices that have been at work in making his district and that continue to be salient in face of the volatile nature of the changes underway in Jakarta.

Many of us came here from Angke (North Jakarta) a couple of decades ago, to make way for something, which I am not sure is even there anymore. We came here alone, we are here alone.  Of course we all knew each other, and those of us who remain here in Menteng Dalam continue to know each other; I mean what’s not to know; it’s not that our lives are so complicated that there are many mysteries.  But, then again, many of the newcomers who have come here over the years—mostly we know what they’re up to, and they all think that they know us Betawi well.  Sure, we look for money any way we can, and we don’t usually like to be told what to do.  We managed to settle this land, taking just enough to live on and do a little something more, and yes, many of us have sold off much of what we controlled, but it’s not like we’re some machine where everyone falls into line or falls asleep every chance they get. 

 Some of our brothers in other parts of the city, well they made mistakes; they wanted to hold on to the prospect of high prices, get the most for their property.  But you have to let all kinds of people have their chance. 

The big money people will come in and then it’s like everything is gone; you have to know how to pace yourself, you can’t just let the big players come in because once they start throwing the big money around they won’t need you for anything any longer.  You see what goes on around here (Menteng Dalam), many got caught up in the popular styles of the time maybe twenty years back, making their houses as fancy as the could with the little money they had.  But now, a lot of them don’t want to look like they’re making things too modern because they don’t want outsiders talking about what a nice place this area is becoming.  Sure there are those who are happy with just letting things take their course or others who are afraid of being squeezed out by all the big developments coming from all directions, but mostly, it seems the smart thing not to get carried away with any one particular kind of thing.

You know we live in this city alone; people prefer it this way.  Now you probably are going to point out that no Indonesian does anything alone; we are always in groups, and always concerned about what people think about what we’re doing.  In this area there are many organizations, and like I said, we basically all know each other, and know that things are going to get complicated no matter what we do.  I was never in a position to do a lot of things I may have wanted to do; I have some rooms to rent and my son got a good position as head of security in the big apartment block they built up the road, so I am not poor.  But it is good to see others here doing different things; sometimes I feel that because they take place close to me that I was able then to make them happen; but it never would have worked if I told those people that they had to this or that they couldn’t do that.  Here, no matter what you do there is going to be a little something left over for others.

Now it is not always going to be evident what that little something might be; it’s not that the guy up the street whose building this fancy rooming house is paying off the neighbors or promising anything.  It’s just that there hasn’t been anything quite like this around here before with this kind of style; people are going have to pay more to stay there for sure than the other rooms around here but they’re going to add an extra element to the area.  It won’t change the larger character of the place but it will definitely add something; they’re going to want some things that others around here don’t necessarily want, and that means one of us could get involved in providing it.  But it is like this all the way around, nothing happens without someone else moving in to take some kind of advantage.  And it couldn’t happen if we all had to agree or fight it out; no, it is because we are alone here.

To be continued

A friend of mine, Bahwani, living in the district, Menteng Dalam, in central Jakarta, repeatedly talks about being in the city “alone.”  While this being alone indeed partly refers to his responsibility to look out for himself, as well as acknowledging that his relative successes and failures are his, alone, to bear, there is another ironic undercurrent.  Bahwani lives in a place where to a large extent no one does anything alone.  But in the realm of much of urban analysis the efforts he and his fellow residents make to make the city mostly stand alone—act as if they count for little. Much about the ways in which cities in the majority world have been built during the last decades on the basis of residents not working alone remains relatively invisible, somewhere out there, on its own.

Urban analysis is now understandably preoccupied with morphogenetics, new aesthetics, material-ecology, guided growth and bio-mimicry.  After all, the former divides between physical, biological, discursive, social and infrastructural settings are being crisscrossed by new translations and transactions.  These would seem to further marginalize the often stuttering, half-baked, and sometimes delusional aspirations and practices of most urban residents.  Still, there may be significant ways in which the ordinary efforts of these residents to intensify the opportunities of urban living may have resonance with these new transactions.  While I do not pursue such confluences here, I cite their potential as a way in which to shed new light on the ordinary.  

The majority of central city residents in Jakarta have attained a sense of durability through their ability to intersect various initiatives aimed at improving livelihood and the built environment.  In a post-colonial era largely without judicious and reliable forms of governance, service provision, and social security, durability rested in the capacities of residents from different walks of life to concretize multiple opportunities for complementary economic activity and flexible collaboration.  Residents responded to locally honed exigencies to do something—almost anything—to make urban living viable.  Since most knew that their initiatives would operate in a crowded field of others, that had to adapt, adjust, negotiate, and come-up with projects that incorporated the ideas, income, and labor of others.  These collaborations were most usually temporary, as projects and people would come and go, and so residents would not rely upon one way of doing things or a particular form of efficacy, but knew that they would have to “spread out”, become equipped at working different versions of themselves and their values.

While these orientations and practices are certainly not specific to Jakarta—drawing on accumulating evidence from other “similar” cities—few cities in the world come to the present time with mixed-income, mixed-use central city districts intact.  This is the case despite the fast growth of mega-development and the consolidation and expansion of a central business district that has displaced tens of thousands of residents over the past two decades.  Still, there is a pervasive feeling across these districts that “things are over”—that ways of life are coming to a close, and that people have to quickly remake themselves in order to take advantage of new residential, economic, and lifestyle opportunities that will only grow more prohibitively expensive in the near future.  The incrementalism that was at the heart of the confidence residents possessed that they could always do something to improve their situation—step by step—seems to be fast disappearing in discourses that center more on total redemption or transformation.

Like many cities throughout the world, residential districts were often settled and occupations built in terms of common ethnicity or place of origin, even though in Jakarta there were so many places of origin and ethnicities that all kinds of proximities and territorial interchanges ensued.  But what was more important was the emphasis on opportunistic intermingling, where new affordances and purchases on the growing metropolitan area could be attained through provisionally putting together different backgrounds, networks, identities and practices. After all, cities are by definition volatile settings; they generate effects always in excess of what can be anticipated or governed; they are full of ruptures and accidents.  So, in the end, it didn’t matter too much who someone was or where they came from; if they brought something potentially useful “to the table”, then residents would try and find a way to make use of it, thus refiguring what they deemed possible or viable.     

 Increasingly, these “tables” are turning, and emphasis is placed, perhaps not so much on who others are, but on more definitive “self-assessments” and the need to individuate and disentangle oneself from intricate, largely implicit collective actions.  Since these collective actions were mostly never the outcomes of formal organizations, contracts, or deliberations—but rather multiple, always revised affiliations with family, neighbors, friends, co-workers, and co-congregants—the attempt of individuals to now increasingly “go it alone” is more complicated. 

For example, residents in my central city neighborhood, Tebet, repeatedly worry about their eligibility for success, whether they are doing the right thing, pursuing the right formula and exuding the right character.  They wonder if they relocate to settings that are more religiously pure or where they have to spend less time tending to the concerns of others.  They rightly complain about the pervasiveness of corruption, and about how brashness, impetuousness, and the imperviousness to notions of property, exactitude, and decorum—that were often an integral part of the resourcefulness of districts—is becoming a kind of parasitism.  They look for cheap apartments in new low-middle income high rises or new properties at the periphery of the city where new, but lesser paying, jobs are being situated. 

To a certain extent many residents may be “jumping the gun”, reacting too quickly to a sense of immanent demise, and that there may indeed be ways to “hang on”, and to do so through capitalizing on the practices of the incremental long familiar to these districts.  Even if their vulnerability is increased, it is important to understand what these long-held orientations have entailed so as to conceptualize strategic maneuvers best suited to enhancing the security of these districts.

In the next post, Bahwani will speak at some length about how his residential area, Menteng Dalam, is trying to operate within a mélange of potentiality and worry.  Bahwani is a 60 year old Betawi man who is my elder by one day—a fact he uses repeatedly to “instruct” me on the way things are.  The Betawi are the “original” inhabitants of Jakarta—a kind of  “mongrel” ethnicity that marks a particular history and way of inhabiting the city more than anything else.

Bahwani remarks will suggest that contemporary local political strategies have to be based on intensifying the ways in which districts seem to exude both ascendancy and decline, laissez faire individual initiative and intricate collaboration, new built environmental forms and incessant repair and remaking of existing structures, oscillating property values across micro-territories choreographed by a mix of moratoriums on land transactions, collective tenure, and speculation.

Once one sets aside the common sense conclusion that the poor are always more vulnerable, things get a little more complicated in Jakarta.  Of course one of the reasons for this common sense is that one doesn’t have to waste time with such complications.  But these complications become a hedge against cheap assaults against the vulnerable and ways of working out intricate arrangements marked by varying layouts of the concrete.  And here the concrete I have in mind is quite literal—the size of thoroughfares, some of which qualify as roads, others as glorified pathways. 

In the vast central city districts such as Bukit Duren, Johar Bahru, Menteng Dalam, or Mataram, land politics have largely centered on where vehicles of certain dimensions can go.  As in many cities, automobility came to embody efficacy in the city.  Even if a household had the financial means to acquire a car, it didn’t necessarily mean that they had somewhere they could easily put it.  The past exigencies of urban residence were—and, of course, largely remain –access to affordable places to live, something accomplished through high densities.  Densities not only availed relatively cheap accommodation; they facilitated multiple forms of social connectivity, information exchange and fluid labor markets that created their own versions of mobility and mobilization.  The ways in which these densities were materialized did not permit easy access for automobiles, especially if they were to be directly stored within the confines of household space. 

In initial spatial layouts designed through government programs or private developments, the usual pattern was to inscribe a few feeder and through-flow roads around which were build the majority of residential plots circumnavigated by small lanes whose sizes depended on the characteristics of the terrain or the extensiveness of the inevitable subdividing and parceling engineered by local residents themselves.  Properties on feeder roads escalated in value as cars became more plentiful, and in many instances, areas that had not been accessible to automobiles were re-plotted –a process that required significant funds in order to assemble the land necessary.  Those with access to such resources would usually, in turn, construct large homes, often in accordance with local regulations specifying that certain proportions of land-holdings had to be developed.  At the same time, cars do find ways of fitting themselves into inhospitable conditions.  In my neighborhood, Tebet Dalam, the small crowded houses that are a few steps up in size and quality from the conventional working class three-room bungalow, take on a different aura as they squeeze a car into a makeshift frontage.  The surrounding lanes barely allow a single car to pass, so herculean maneuvers are always required if more than two cars show up at the same time.

The stereotypical portrayals of automobility as producing less dependence on others—as individuals, capable of moving around the city according to their own individuated temporality and desires— seem to ring true in Jakarta’s car-accommodating areas. Here, a persistent quiet seems attributable to the fact that residents are either rarely at home or have little need to occupy the street as a space of social conviviality or economic necessity.  Although professionally, I often meet many people who reside in such situations, I rarely inquire anymore about events or conditions regarding the larger district in which they live since they always seem to know little about what is going on. 

As these car-accommodating streets are by far the minority of pathways in these area, they can come to have a ghostly feel to them, as they are surrounded by lanes that are extensions of household interiors, themselves extensions of the lanes.  Crowdedness is not just a function of the miniscule size of most residences; their stale or suffocating air, but also a function of the creation of a different kind of mobility. 

Cooking, chatting, grooming, cleaning, repairing, gossiping, and gaming all take place as part of the domestic and convivial neighborhood life.  But residents primarily use crowdedness to experience another kind of mobility. They have a sense of enlarging their reach and access into events and territories having cars wouldn’t really expedite.  For they mostly talk about what is going on elsewhere; what others are up to who are not visibly present.  Sometime this interest in exteriority is concretized through specific projects—travels to markets or to distant work sites, collective investment in a trading place outside the district, taking over a food selling operation near the parking lot of a new shopping mall, appropriating abandoned space for storage, or inserting small trades in the fringes along busy thoroughfares, or running protection services.

Whatever form this interest takes, it becomes a possibility for residents of a district to be in a larger world together—in ways that do not assume a past solidity of affiliations, a specific destination nor an ultimate collective formation to come. As such, what many Jakarta residents have come to misconstrue as poor neighborhoods generate an economic dynamism that enables those with comfortable middle class residents yet increasing nervous dispositions to stay put, and thus help ward us the incursions of big developers—for now.

Once one gets past the common sense assumption that the poor are always more vulnerable, the spatial politics of the traditional residential districts of Jakarta dramatize a series of complicities and trade-offs.  Contiguous districts of relative wealth and impoverishment offer each other specific affordances—each covers, hedges, protects and sustains the other in ways that are not clearly just or without manipulation.  The penetration of cars for the time being generates money that enables the areas where cars can’t go to keep the really big and debilitating money at bay.  These are twists and turns not easily available to concrete.

In speculations on urban futures—full of proclaimed sustainabilities—what is made of that which is no longer.  For cities are replete with phantoms—long standing built environments which are not simply let to rot but also become the backdrop to activities that go on, sometimes in practically the same space that they have for decades.  While portions of these near-ruins continue to stand out as indicators that one has arrived at a particular place, the activities—buying, selling, trading, conversing, or dwelling—obscure the degree of the decline.  A nascent observer might be inclined to think that the busyness points to an even-denser array of commotion behind, where interiors are full of even better opportunities.  But often there is nothing there, inside.  In one of Jakarta’s most significant markets, Pasar Minggu, the interiors are full of stalls long shuttered; stairways lead to more vacancies.  There remain budgets for management and fees are still collected; there are men in uniforms, who pace nervously along the hundreds of small stalls that completely envelope the commercial centers, parking lots, and produce sheds, looking for something to take charge of even as any authority they once had has been passed on to networks of brokers and tough guys.,  Women in elaborately adorned Muslim gear promise to invest the meager earnings of traders in Shari’ah correct securities. These are sometimes based on speculations that the value of the land of which the market sits will swallow it up.

With adjacent transportation stations nearly empty, it would be reasonable to assume that the prevailing logic is to bring circulation to a near-halt.  Minivans and buses crawl their way on the main roads as little by little during the course of the days traders encroach further on to the asphalt, bringing discounts right into the windows of passing vehicles whose passengers now long for distraction.  Yet, throughout the frontage of this phantom market, the produce still sparkles with freshness.  They are no longer things to be contained in stalls and subject to the ordinances of disinterested civil servants, but rather as extrusions of landscape, a heaving of interwoven aspirations and forces interrupting the best laid plans.  With all of the mobilizing energy that goes into running the operations of the “real” market, the decaying structures behind could have been repaired, repainted, and re-tooled in a matter of days.  But who will do this, who will makes claims for the efforts, who will be willing to re-locate where; who has the authority or ideas to re-frame the return to the inside as anything other than retreat.  

In part, this is the power of phantoms.  They don’t simply go away, nor are they objects of rehabilitation or re-design.  In cities, then, phantoms are built environments that are always more than what we made of them.  Their function and use might have been a way of domesticating and constraining their impact, but the materials, labor, and institutions that were put to work always brought with them and opened out to vast connections. Phantoms are persistence, unembellished and unredeemed; since things don’t depend on the character of our relationships with them to be what they are.  Pasar Minggu is no longer a market, but it still is a market.  As such phantoms teach us something about what to do with the immanence of loss, or rather, about all of the wasted effort we often make in trying to stave off loss.  Whatever trauma is then experienced at the loss itself is then partly a compensation for all the energy spent trying to keep it from happening.  A constellation of ineptness, inertia, resistance, and manipulation has let Pasar Minggu go, and in many important ways this need not have been the case—there were and always are other options.  But now that it is gone….

Well practically anywhere.  Connected as it is to so many circuits, even if many of them are at most faint memories.  If it were ever to be the capital of Azawad, a new, primarily Tuareg, nation carved out of northern Mali, it won’t see a Sofitel anytime soon.  It has few remnants of desert urban exotica—the hazy kerosene lit nights in crowded percussive markets scented with mint and incense have long given way to the drudgery of generators, domestic abuse and truck exhaust.  The failures of once pastoral lives forced into trite stability and the endless motion of those for whom tomorrow’s nutrition always remains uncertain piles up via material wreckage of all kinds.  Chewed tires, rusted trucks, salted garbage, and encrusted effluvia.

The city reaches hard to fold in the benefits of smuggling routes from which is just a little too distant to play the role of entrepôt. The small strip of bars now and then hosts some of the world’s best guitarists but for the most part Malian uniformed regulars were more intimidated by the universal acclaim of these musicians than the uncanny ability of bandits, guerrillas, and smugglers to outmaneuver them.  As one of the pillars of Qaddafi’s long haul, they are now returning “home”—a constantly oscillating band of territory whose dimensions vary like breathing in and breathing out, impervious to demarcation.  Saharan economies that have long passed nearly everything along, tend to treat Gao like a sieve—money pours in, but it is never quite clear where it goes, and except for a few gleaming buildings and showpieces, the city has little to show for it, and its reputation as the end of the line always seem to demand some kind of display of either definitive demise or promise. 

That neither is on the radar doesn’t mean that Gao is an anachronism.  Far from it.  The city never took its history of ridicule seriously.  It is a city ready to be folded in as the periphery of many games, fights and deals to come, with fingers pointing to Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Sudan and 

Côte D’Ivoire.  Whatever secessionist aspirations or pretensions are now at work and no mater who is really calling the shots in and for Bamako, Gao will always be a city to leave quickly, and thus a city of the most experimental sort.

What Nino’s gift suggests is that efforts to make relationships when they seem impossible can go a long way in getting things done.  And in order to make those relationships happen, you often have to resort to a kind of ruse—you have to pretend to know the answers that others want, you have to know where the bodies are buried, even if you have no idea, in order to set in motion the actions that will make the relationship happen.  For even Nino, knew that he couldn’t do it alone, he would have to get others involved, in any way that he could.

The story of Nino and his father also raises a point about a different kind of gift than the one that we may be accustomed to.  When I give my children something for their birthday, for example, I select an object or experience directly for them, something for their possession.  But there are gifts that happen seemingly by accident and which do not appear the larger world as a gift.  Although Nino concocted his story about the missing bodies in order to get the police to take the action that being behind bars prevented him from doing, neither he nor his father could then announce to the world that, yes, Nino had given his father the wonderful gift of digging up the back yard in order to prepare a tomato garden.  Such an announcement might create more problems for both Nino and his father than the problem of getting the backyard ready for tomatoes.

This is a gift that cannot look like a gift.  This is a gift that the father cannot now claim as his property.  If he is now able to plant the tomatoes and then give them to his friends and family, he cannot tell everyone that this is thanks to the gift that he received from his son, a gift that now belongs to him.  Thus the tomatoes are officially the result of an accidental occurrence, something that should not otherwise have happened. 

So many gifts—many opportunities to do things in cities, to have a place, to have certain experiences—cannot really be claimed as the property of the recipient.  After all, in order for an object, such as a piece of land or a house to become a piece of property, it has to be recognized as such by others or registered with some authority in order to become something which the recipient can do with in any way they want.

In big global meetings on urban issues during the past several decades, one hears over and over that “cities belong to their inhabitants.”  This worthy phrase was intended to promote greater inclusiveness for citizens in urban planning and governance.  It is meant to remind us that the city doesn’t work and is not sustainable if its resources, spaces, and opportunities are dominated by the few.  It reminds us that there are no urban futures without the participation of a city’s inhabitants. But if the city belongs to its inhabitants, who does it belong to, and what does it mean for a city to belong to anyone?  How long should someone be in a city before they are considered inhabitants, and how do we know who actually lives in a city? Does an inhabitant have to have a formal dwelling, do they have to work, do they have to sleep inside the city boundaries, do they have to be of a certain age?  How do we count what really counts?

While governing cities requires a lot of knowledge about the numbers and features of the population to be governed; while it needs some sense of order, of who can legitimately do what where, of who has the authority to occupy specific spaces and jobs, cities have also worked by avoiding such counts.  In other words, the ability of citizens to learn from each other, to work together, to pool their knowledge and experiences, to bring together different skills and points of view in order to produce new ways of doing things has often been the result of “accidental gifts.” 

This is where people come together and discover each other—not because they had to, not because they were fulfilling their responsibilities as citizens—but because the opportunity arose in the midst of people doing other things.  They may have been dealing with a broken water pipe, strolling leisurely in the streets at night, celebrating a religious festivity that brought together different crowds, gathering around a traveling food cart in a neighborhood, or having a heated yet friendly discussion on public transportation.  The places and opportunities here are not the property of anyone in particular; they do not belong to anyone specific; no claims are being made about ownership.

Like Nino’s gift, they came about not because someone went out directly and announced to all the world that they were going to dig up a back garden in order to plant tomatoes.  They had to work their way through something else.  And so cities have to have plenty of spaces and opportunities for these accidents to happen—for people to run into each other, watch each other, and enjoy each other.

Throughout urban history there have been a lot of fantasies about digging.  Digging deeper sub-basements and higher flyovers; digging up vast old neighborhoods in order to constantly replace them with the latest version on the market.  But the way that cities get made is by a different kind of digging—people digging around for new opportunities, pretending that they are not really digging after all.  For in the end, who knows where the real truth of the city is buried.  We think we can dig up the answers by continuing to look and look.  Meanwhile, many people in the city are just digging, making some use of whatever they find.  The results are often not pretty, and sometimes cause a lot of problems.  But this is how work is created, and cities need new jobs.  For as the prophets tell us, the politicians will become farmers and the citizens will feast on the ripest tomatoes.

 

Photo: Matthew Sharp

Coming back to the story of Nino and his father, what Nino offered his papa was a kind of gift.  By telling the authorities that the bodies were buried in his father’s back yard he offered the very means of lending a hand that his imprisonment seemed to make impossible.  At the beginning there seemed to be no way that Nino would be able to help his father—the crime, the judges, and the jail got in the way.  What Nino could offer was a “confession”—a confession that ended up being a lie.  The failure to produce the bodies thus guaranteed that Nino’s act was going to make things more difficult for him. 

Often when someone confesses to knowing something that others have wanted to find out for a long time, there is an exchange.  The prisoner may get some time shaved off from his sentence or win more favourable treatment, or at least, soothe a guilty conscience by having finally confessed.  But here, Nino will not get anywhere with his action, except the satisfaction to have helped his father.  This is a gift that had to overcome obstacles and it had to be wrapped up in a confession that hid the fact that what was being offered was not the truth but a gift.  And since the gift was predicated on a lie, it was not going to take Nino anywhere else—neither free him from prison nor any guilty conscience if he indeed had one. 

But it says a lot about gifts and a lot about the kinds of sensibilities that have been at work in building cities in the so-called Global South. Of course, with long histories of colonial rule, cities like Sao Paolo, Karachi, Mexico City, Lagos, Jakarta, and Manila were full of so-called “gifts” brought by the Dutch, the Spanish, the British, the French, the Portuguese or the Americans.  There were the gifts of education, religious faith, infrastructure, modern institutions, and so forth.  And of course, these apparent gifts were not that at all.  They were offered at a big price, as a display of power to show the “natives” who was more capable and to justify the theft of land, people’s spirits and resources. 

These were gifts that could never be fully accepted because they entailed all kinds of future obligations, obligations that are still are impossible to pay back.  But there were other kinds of gifts.  Gifts, more like Nino’s; gifts that entailed individuals risking getting into more trouble than they already were in so as to help to those whose subsequent efforts they may not have been able to witness directly—just like Nino will probably never see the tomatoes growing in his father’s garden, but yet imagined them thick and ripe on the vine.  Cities were full of such offerings—residents willing to take the risk to try something different—even if they did not believe that this was going to really represent who they were, even though their actions were not going to tell the “truth” about themselves.

Nino had the perfect excuse not to be able to lend a hand—he was in prison, what could he do.  He might have felt guilty, but anyone would have excused him if he were not able to help in this instance. 

Cities have largely been built by people who have gone out of their way to offer things—their experience, money, or time—for projects of uncertain returns. In our work in Jakarta looking at the history of neighborhoods in the urban core, residents repeatedly tell stories about simple housewives that became activists, businessmen who hired all the hardened criminals, car mechanics who fixed broken water pipes at no cost, and police who turned their posts into schools for kids who could not afford the regular ones.  There are hundreds of stories about people saying one thing so as to accomplish another—of appearing to follow the rules in order to bend them, of looking like they were cold heart people in order to better care for those who were vulnerable.

Of course cities are full of parasites, of the elite trampling every aspiration of those who have little, of people stopping at nothing to get their own way.  Cities have often been places of imposition—the imposition of particular agendas and ways of doing things.  Practices of imposing become generalized: fire departments demand cash payments at a scene of a burning building before they will put the fire out; water basins are contaminated by polluting industries—examples are endless.  Imposition is a process of not taking into consideration, and thus a refusal of relationship, a refusal of a relationship with the city. 

A gift then is an action that makes a relationship with something where otherwise there might not be any basis for doing so.  Just like Nino—who did not have an obvious basis to help with his father’s tomatoes—a critical dimension of urban life has been the capacity of people to make relationships with things, events and people that on the surface do not seem to have an obvious connection, that don’t seem to belong.  In mixed neighborhoods of Jakarta, while the have and have-nots may not dine with each other every evening, they still manage to make relationships with each other even if there is no obvious basis for doing so.  People will go out of their way to offer advice or a hand even if they are not eligible to do so—in other words, even if they do not have the background or official training to get involved in someone else’s life. 

In fact, the willingness of people to act even when they are not eligible—even when they do not have the authority, education, social or personal background to—has been key to the ability of residents to forge relationships with each other, and thus through those relationships create opportunities for work, for better livelihoods, for spaces of freedom that would not have been possible without those relationships.  For if people only have something to say, only will act when they feel eligible to do so, then few people will take risks, people will remain in their corners, in their narrow worlds, and few new experiences will be created, and no tomatoes planted.

This does not mean that everything that takes place has to be seen as relevant for everyone; it doesn’t mean that people have to set about making relationships between everything. For conversely, to see or feel connectedness and relevance to all that takes place within a city would be debilitating of the plurality of initiatives required for the city to function.  Without certain impositions, there would be nothing for others to respond to, differentiate themselves, or align with.

The following is a story that has been circulating across the internet for some months, and from which I build some observations on urban lives:

An old Italian lived alone in New Jersey.  He wanted to plan his annual tomato garden, but it was very difficult work as the ground was hard.  His only son, Nino, who used to help him, was in prison.  The old man wrote a letter to his son and described his predicament.

Dear Nino,

I am feeling pretty sad, because it looks like I won’t be able to plan my tomato garden this year.  I’m just getting to old to be diffing up a garden plot.  I know if you were here my troubles would be over.  I know you would be happy to dig the plot for me, like the old days.

Love, Papa.

A few days later he received a letter from his son.

Dear Papa,

Don’t dig up the garden.  That’s where the dead bodies are buried.

Love, Nino

At 4 a.m. the next morning, FBI agents and local police arrived and dug up the entire area without finding any dead bodies.  They apologized to the old man and left.  That same day the old man received another letter from his son.

Dear Papa,

Go ahead and plan the tomatoes now.  That’s the best I could do under the circumstances.  Love you, Nino

This story says several things about urban life.  First, you could obviously consider Nino’s actions as a kind of deception.  He puts in motion actions that are suppose to dig up the truth about a particular event, an event that is not yet resolved—that is, locating the missing bodies in a crime that Nino seemingly has been imprisoned for.  While the problem of the missing bodies in the end remains unresolved, Nino is able to ensure that the garden for his father’s tomatoes will have been prepared for planting.  Additionally, Nino has claimed to know where bodies—truly missing in the eyes of the authorities—are located.  But is this the crime for which Nino has been imprisoned?

In other words, without the evidence of the missing bodies, has Nino indeed gone to jail for this crime?  While we don’t know for sure, what we do know is that there are various deceptions at work.  Nino has convinced the authorities that he knows the location of bodies, and though he may actually know the “real” location of the missing bodies, his ability to get the authorities to take the action they did—digging up the back yard—did not rely upon whether he really knew that they were dead bodies and that they were missing. 

What this tells us is that in all of the efforts we make to accomplish things—to make something happen, whether is to affect other people, set in motion a chain of events or create the life conditions that we want—is that much of this happens indirectly.  We have to go around other people’s expectations of what they want from us, what they think we capable of doing, and what they think we want from them.  As soon as we put any initiative into motion, we face misunderstandings, resistance, competition, and sometimes threats.  In face of these constraints, we can change our minds, try and adapt what we want or try to change the attitudes and behaviours of those around us. We could compromise, make deals, tell others we will do this and that for them if only they will accommodate all or some of what it is we want to do.  We can make our cooperation with others contingent upon their willingness to ensure that we get a piece of the action. 

In these games and deals we tend to prioritize what is really important.  In all of things that we want to make happen, we often have to decide how to rank things, fix the value of each thing in terms of its relations to others.  Of course this happens all of the time.  With limited opportunities, we have to decide upon our own needs or those of our loved ones—who will get to go to school, who will get to have extra opportunities, who will get the bulk of our time, our effort and resources.

Cities are full of things that did happen—aspirations that reached fruition, lives that created spaces of maneuver, opportunities to accumulate resources and experience.  And when you look at the history of how things that happened—neighborhoods built, households with money, individuals with a lot of knowledge about things, people with authority—they often did not get to be that way, to get where they are now by going at their goals directly.  So often, people have set off to do things—with objective, plans, and working procedures in mind—only to find out that they operated in an already crowded field with others trying to put in motion their own plans.  Too often they found that if they put all of their eggs into one basket, if they committed themselves too much to one idea, one objective, that might not only lose everything, but get so discouraged they would settle for almost anything or convince themselves that what others wanted from them is what they, in the end, really wanted for themselves.

To avoid discouragement and capitulation, many urban dwellers did a little bit at a time.  In fact, for many, the idea wasn’t to come up with a plan or to have an overriding aspiration.  Rather they just tried to do something, anything, and see what happened, see how the waters got stirred, who was paying attention, who got excited or upset, who cared a lot about what they were doing and who didn’t care at all.  If one could do a little bit at a time, you could often manage to stay under the radar, not draw too much attention to yourself—not make others jealous or provoke them to go after what you were trying to do because they either had more friends, power or money to take it away from you. 

On the other hand, urban dwellers often did things, anything, to let others know that they were willing to take some risks, to put themselves on the line to change their conditions, to work with others—so it did not much matter what people put forward as their projects—whether it be to fix up the house, add a few rooms, start a small business, pool some money with others to buy something on the cheap.  What was important was to indicate a readiness to move, to get going.  The specifics of what you put forward were not the relevant thing here.  While residents did indeed often want to get somewhere specific, accomplish something concrete and tangible for themselves and their families, they were often also willing to let things happen, to allow themselves to end up in circumstances they never expected and then learned to call those unfamiliar even strange conditions “home”, or, at least a temporary home.

In addition, many realized that the impact of any single initiative could be increased through its becoming an aspect or component in the initiatives of others—not by virtue of being locked down in contractual relationships or mutual obligations.  Rather, it was a way of making whatever you were doing something that could be made use of by others.  Collaboration among residents then covers a whole lot of different options:  Sometimes residents would simply pay attention to what each other was doing in order to do something else.  At other times, there might be collective discussions among relatives, friends, neighbours, co-workers or colleagues about how to put different skills or contacts together in order to support what remained largely individual projects. 

Sometimes neighbors would silently agree not to interfere with each others 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.

These so-called deceptions then are at the heart of urban life, and as such, we can’t take all that much for granted—things are not what they seem to be.  Many urban neighborhoods look like they are a complete mess, in a total state of disrepair.  But something else is often going on—for behind the mess may exist complex local economies full of different trades and activities silently working together, and where their ability to work together requires that there be no one with sufficient authority to say that this particular activity or object has to go, has to be cleaned up. 

In ramshackle, messy environments, people often ask why improvements are not made; why residents do not simply get together and pool their resources to make their communities nicer.  Piles of materials—bricks, old refrigerators, pieces of wood, old tin roofs, wrecked cars— sometimes accumulate for years with apparently little use and that seemingly could be easily discarded.  Yet they hang on as if exerting some magical power. 

Of course, communities work hard at  “community improvement.”  Even when they do not, it is not a matter always of a lack of resources or cooperation, but rather a sense of letting histories run their course, of retaining memories of all the ways a particular space and deteriorating object or infrastructure has been used.  And this can become important because it lets people know that the neighborhood and all that is within it—its people and objects— are available to be used in many different ways by many different combinations of people.  These are environments that not only show the excess of past use, but convey to the outside the world that their efforts to impose their orders, their ways of doing things, their attempts to straighten things out, and get people to behave all proper are not going to work here. 

Over time initiatives—incremental, individual, collaborative, short or long term—have had a substantial impact on the urban built environment.   In some areas of Jakarta, for example, every street and lane is characterized by mixtures of the old and the new, the single and multi-storey, with all kinds of materials and design styles being put to use.  While districts may contain mixtures of residences, single rooms for rent, commercial, storage, recreational spaces, churches and mosques throughout, these mixtures take their own particular forms and emphases block by block. 

Residents thus live in a built environment that allows or constrains particular comings and goings, visibilities and vantage points, soundscapes, inputs and evacuations of raw materials and waste, and public exposure and private containment.  In other words, these are city spaces where there many different ways to get something done, many different alternatives to accomplish things when the way that you are familiar with or prefer isn’t possible just now—and people who live and work in these places, know this.  How do they know this, because the way these places look—full of different ins and outs and different kinds of stuff and different places where you can put your body.  All this reminds them of these possibilities every day.  The city authorities and other outside powers may come into these places and look for the missing bodies—for all the casualties, the bad influences, the sickness, immoralities, and damages— but instead may only find a hundred varieties of tomatoes.

While most will talk about fundamentalism as the return to and adherence to a set of unchanging truths about life and how to act within it, I want to read urban fundamentalism as opening up a space and time of the miraculous.  By the miraculous I means the ability of urban residents to act without being eligible to act—where something is put in motion, put in place regardless of whether individuals have any recognizable capacity to do this.  The miraculous thus becomes a way enabling the city to do the job of the city.

 

For the city was to e the place where people could change their lives, leave behind the strictures of claustrophobic accountability and obligations.  The haunting of guilt and ancestors, the pull of the land, and the anchorage of people within ecologies of seasons, crops, and spirits could be dispensed with in favor of a more systematic, rational formula of self-design, and the shared benefits of public life and urban citizenship.  Of course as there were few real examples of such an idea, the imagery of citizenship was to be more a matter of accords and deals.  The city had to be made sufficiently liveable—in terms of the salubrious, industrious, the moral—in order for it to be profitable.  In opting for a more civilized existence, those inhabiting the city also were more inclined to leave civilization behind as well, as the capacity to fight and disrupt could also be intense.  The irony here is that the evidence for the transformation of human possibility inherent in ideal model of the city may largely come from the section of the urban population which, in the so-called Global South, we know little about.  This population is a kind of phantom majority—neither strictly poor nor middle class nor rich but who have found some way to do slightly more than just hang on, but at the same time, are never powerful enough to impose their own visions of city life.  These are the teachers, factory workers, civil servants, service workers, cops, drivers, clerks, technicians, small storeowners….

 

They always had to roll with the punches, do things that they perhaps never imagined themselves doing. For as Ackbar Abbas puts it, too often urban politics is the politics of disappointment—about the “not there” in what is there; it is about being transported to a place you didn’t think you were at.  Urban residents no matter what their background for the most part wanted a version of the good life and they were willing to make a lot of sacrifices to try and get it.  But all the effort urban majorities across the Global South made to disentangle themselves from kin and neighborhood ties and obligations and to turn themselves into enterprising individuals inorder to give them a shot at this good life often only produced a sense that, damn, this is nowhere and that it is too late to do anything about it.  All the investments in property, education, and making their lives legible only got people deeper into debt, further away from where the real economic action is, more isolated, and more insecure.  At the same time, all of the efforts that this same majority made to compensate for a job that didn’t pay enough—for building livelihoods and living spaces incrementally over time, for honing highly adept strategies for working with others to increase their exposure to opportunities and the larger world—while still holding—may suddenly fall apart as well.

 

While some have explained the compensation for these disappointments by citing a renewal of religious fundamentalism, I would argue that whatever the embrace of this device of religious faith may be, it is also compelled by recognition of the fundamentals of the city.  In other words, no system of accountability or categorization can completely control what comes out of urban life.  While controlling people is often predicated on making them recognize their eligibility for particular benefits and opportunities, urban life exceeds any definition of eligibility—it is, what the Senegalese youth call “our time.”

 

The anthropologist Ghassan Hage tells us that once crisis implied the suspension of everyday order and self-discipline so that people could put together new ways of acting to deal with the inadequacies of the past  and new opportunities for the future. But now, the contemporary governance of crisis makes keeping the old order and discipline the main component.  He gives the example that queuing for the bus in an orderly fashion should be contingent upon the bus actually arriving.  It would make no sense to continuing queuing for a bus that never arrives.  But this is exactly the relationship that contemporary governance tends to take apart.  Order and discipline should be maintained during the crisis of the bus never arriving, and that in fact, the bus will never arrive if the people do not queue.  Of course this is an inversion of the conventional logic of things.  Those who refuse to queue, those who are unruly, who protest or rebel, not only disqualify themselves from the resolution of the crisis but become responsible for its perpetuation, thus reinforcing the need for orderliness.  Buses, water, power, modernity, sustainability or better livelihoods thus won’t arrive because the potential recipients of these things have not yet demonstrated sufficient eligibility for them—are not worthy of them.  Plus, their unworthiness is the very things that keeps these things from being sufficiently delivered even to those who have demonstrated their worthiness.  And so in the end, this emphasis on eligibility is a kind of ruse, since it covers  up the reality that no actor or sector can really get a handle on what the city is and what it is becoming.

 

This emphasis on eligibility on amplifies the twists and warps that ripple across the urban fabric.  Districts come and go with increasing speed.  Vast new developments become ghost towns as soon as they are completed.  Wealth is made and lost in a matter of minutes.  Control can be exerted over the smallest of biochemical transactions and across wide expanses of the earth.  Yet many urban areas are completely off limits to any form of official policing.  This is a process that gives rise to new aberrant forms—legal illegalities, know unknowns, socialist market economies, and so forth.  The norms we rely upon to know the world morph into something else.  But paying attention to all of these aberrant forms of urban life—its proliferating twists and bends—then become a kind of deception.  A deception for the fact that the city has always already fundamentally become something other than what we thought it was.

 

The emphasis on eligibility becomes a way of reading this complexity in a way that puts the onus on the compliance, the order of individual lives.  For example, conditional cash transfers are a way of calculating the distribution of income subsidies according to formulas which specify norms concerning, for example, a child’s physical growth, attendance at school, and health.  While there is less money around for social welfare spending, governments are rightly concerned with cost efficiencies.  Still, the generalization of eligibility as the main approach to crisis management fails to take head-on the challenges of deception and how to operate in cities where it is increasingly important to act with big gestures but where it is also difficult to know what is going on.  There are so many things to pay attention to, so many potentially relevant factors to take into consideration in trying to figure out just what is going on, that some things are just going to be left out, and you never can really tell for sure whether what is left out is really important or not.  All that stuff about telling true from false can be simply too much work for little payoff.

 

Here it is useful to consider Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the “power of the false” in his reflections on cinema.  The process of making a film generates all kinds of in-between moments—as you rarely ever see a film that proceeds in real time from beginning to end.  Each frame or scenarios need not follow from the preceding scene—angles, vantage points, time, and arrays of images can all be recombined.  Instead of an indirect image of time being derived from how things actually move, a direct time image—that is creating a specific sense of time in how the film unfolds—produces its own sense of movement, through sound and optical intensities that exist outside of any story line, theme or objective.  Multiple experiences of the present, logically impossible to experience in any real, simultaneous time, can come to the fore; story lines can be modified by disconnected places and moments out of any temporal sequence.  In film you can go to the movies, get on a plane to Europe, and go swimming in the ocean, all at 3pm today.  So each in-between in cinema comes to question its own truth, its own limits of what is possible, and thus unleash a wide range of possibilities.  This is what Deleuze calls the power of the false—that, “which replaces and supersedes the forms of the true, because it poses the simultaneity of incompossible presents, or the co-existence of non-necessarily true pasts.

 

Additionally, Deleuze characterizes contemporary cinema as that in which “the people are missing.”  For talking about people as being parts of a social class or ethnic identity or political aspiration is not adequate to either the potentials opened up cinematic events nor the unfolding politics of urban life.  As such, the people, the people of the city have to be invented.  This, as Vincente Rafael put it, is a different kind of state of exception, perhaps akin to a miracle.  Writing about Filiipino vernacular experiences of freedom, the missing people discovers themselves in the very inviting and welcoming of their arrival in a process that is never completed and is always underway.  In other words, the urban majority discovers itself not in dissecting its practices and identifies, not at the ballot box, but by always taking on the challenge of  paying attention to  and absorbing ways of life that are not always recognizable, of creating urban spaces where nothing is summed up, where residents can try lots of different things without feeling like they going to mess up the situation for everyone.  People come together and discover each other—not because they had to, not because they were fulfilling their responsibilities as citizens—but because the opportunity arose in the midst of people doing other things.  They may have been dealing with a broken water pipe, strolling leisurely in the streets at night, celebrating a religious festivity that brought together different crowds, gathering around a traveling food cart in a neighborhood, or having a heated yet friendly discussion on public transportation.

 

The sense of urgency about dealing with the uncertainties of urban life today means that one cannot simply depend upon the inherited notions about people of the past—the old stories about modernity, development and progress.  There must be a way of seeing between the lines, or ways of making lines between stories that are going in way too many different directions. 

 

On the one hand, there is enough evidence to be convinced that city life everywhere is heading in a more convergent, unified direction.  But with such evidence, it is all the more striking that minor differences among places and people can be so powerful and inequities so pronounced.  Poverty is being successfully addressed and ignored; well-being is increasing, as is the intensification of dissatisfaction and alarm.  Lets look at all of the containers through which urban life is enacted. There are images of people as objects of class position, cultural, national and religious identity, expressions of probabilistic behavior, risk and development “careers” and indicators of complex configurations of demographic, biochemical and biopolitical variables.  Yet they are all inadequate ways of thinking, feelings and speaking about how urban life is experienced and acted upon.  What Deleuze suggests in his observations of cinema, is how to think about lines of commonality, conveyance, and intensity among different facets of urban life that on the surface don’t seem to go together at all.

 

This is the fundamentalism of the urban and the faith in the city—it is how residents have endured.  For endurance depends upon the continuous fascination of discovery—the willingness to suspend the familiar and even the counted-upon in order to engage something unexpected. This engagement may sometimes simply reiterate a commitment to what already is, where the person decides that it is better to stay put with what is familiar.  At other times, effort is made to find a way to make what is discovered useful, to incorporate it into one’s life or see it as another vehicle to be occupied, and where time and energy is transferred from one way of being in the world into another.

 To make something feel similar is not a matter of finding the terms through which one way of doing things or being is translated into another.  This is what Shariah teaches Muslims—there is no way to make sense of God’s law, no way to definitively translate it into a language that everyone will understand.  Translation certainly exists as a necessary and constant activity of interchange.  It is something that we do all of the time, and endurance certainly relies upon the capacity of the diverse experiences and perspectives of different actors to be translatable.

 Yet, the majority of which I have been speaking has long known that causes and effects have no built-in articulation; there is no plan that an observer sees in its entirety that originates in a single intention and then unfolds across the trajectory of space.  This doesn’t mean that there are no intentions; it doesn’t mean that people do not set out to do harm or good.  Rather, residents knew that they existed in a crowded field where everyone had to try to do something, and if you were going to make something happen, you’d have to work with others that you weren’t going to know very well or necessarily trust.  For if everyone simply worked with the people they were expected to work with then nothing really different would happen, and life was already too uncertain to simply have nothing happen.

 So endurance is a by-product of bridge building—a way of making things similar no matter what they might be.  This similarity, then, is lived through as a means of continuance.  Ways of life, territory, and identities may indeed be defended needlessly to the bitter end.  Outcries that something should survive at all costs are certainly not unfamiliar in all cities.  But the capacity to endure—i.e. the capacity to construct lines of connection between seemingly disconsonant experiences or ways of doing things, and which are without confident translations—is perhaps more significant. 

 In cities where significant proportion of the population has historically relied upon their own initiatives—in various forms of combination with the initiatives of  institutions and various associations and networks—many different things are going to take place.  Buildings will assume all kinds of shapes and sizes, economic activities will take place at various scales with various degrees of seriousness, investment and management smarts, and all kinds of emotions will come to the fore—as many of these initiatives won’t work.  Hopes will be raised and quashed; people will get greedy but also spread their good fortune around; people will get desperate and try anything, while others will hold on to whatever they have.  How do residents continue then through this diversity of intensities, events, calculations, losses and gains?  A sense of similarity would have to be constructed; a sense that no matter what people are doing that there is sufficient similarity amongst them that enables them to be co-present.  It doesn’t mean that they necessarily have to like each other, get along, invite each other to dinner, take each other into consideration, or organize various formats of solidarity.  Rather, the willingness to see and feel similarity is the modality of enduring through this daily urban life.  This is the miracle of the city.