May 2013
1 post
Stories from "Tampa"--Part One
A desire to have it both ways has pervaded the settlement practices of many cities. It was important to retain proximity to the “shore”, since it was the venue for the arrival of flows and for the possibility of heading elsewhere. In many cases this shore fronted an uncertain interior full of unclaimed riches and unmanageable dangers—terrain that could not be definitively settled or...
April 2013
2 posts
The Hollows: Tambora Market
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...
Black Beach--Part Four
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...
March 2013
1 post
Black Beach--Part Three
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...
February 2013
1 post
Meeting Head-On
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...
December 2012
2 posts
And their eyes were not watching God
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...
Black Angel of Memory
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,...
November 2012
1 post
Black Beach--part two
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...
October 2012
1 post
Black Beach--part one
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...
September 2012
3 posts
Steal Away, Steal Away Back Home
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,...
Succinct and Sloppy Failure: Urbanism from Phnom...
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...
No wasted labs--South Beirut
Wastelands are laboratories for gathering up the odds and ends of seemingly disparate situations, enabling them to dwell in the warmth of a disarming intimacy. They do not keep things apart as much as they staunch the overflows of gestures, impressions, and curiosities urban residents just can’t seem to keep to themselves. On the one hand they are the necessary interruption for...
August 2012
2 posts
Espíritos de Salvador
Salvador. The critical entrepôt of slavery full of sediments from the enforced intersection of Africa and America finds itself the bearer of all kinds of new imaginaries. The city’s seemingly endless alignment with the sea and its conversion from reliquary to economic powerhouse provides a platform for the fantasies of new beginnings. The veneer of conviviality—embodied by the public...
Policy games and Preman--Part Two
To be “free” of social anchorage may mean being considered a criminal and thug—this is the “price” to be paid for such autonomy. But what an individual does from that position—while never completely shaking off the designation as criminal—is also open and need not assumed a fixed relationship to the prevailing standards of normality and legality. This, in turn, disrupts the fixed positions...
July 2012
2 posts
Policy games and Preman--Part One
The exigency of dealing with the uncertainties of urban life today means that one simply cannot only consider the inherited notions about “people of the past”—e.g. the conventional stories about modernity, development and progress—nor long-standing notions of identity. There must be a way of seeing between the lines—a space that is not so much interstices but substantial in its own right, no...
The enchantments of occupation--part four
The final installment in the essay on the spectral quality of mega-developments.
We come back to the beginning of this essay. Back to the lucrative opportunities for the maintenance personnel of the mega-complexes. For in Jakarta these have become sites of strange occurrences. There are nights when the switchboards of the maintenance room are full of distress calls—water appearing out of...
June 2012
2 posts
The enchantments of occupation--part three
Because the financing of any given development project is hedged against the completion of a subsequent project, it is usually important for developers to demonstrate that the project is fully or nearly fully occupied. This is why intense marketing efforts are made prior to construction and with promises of marked discounts, often aided by property laws that allow resale without taxation...
The enchantments of occupation--part two
This is the second post in a series about the spectral complexion of mega-development in Jakarta.
The way in which mega-developments consolidate a sense of the transurban is through an abstract form of conviviality and mutual recognition. It relies on being disentangled from the complications of street-level urban life and employment that puts a premium on innovative calculation, personal...
May 2012
4 posts
The enchantments of occupation--part one
The following is the first post in a four part series. The series concerns both the concrete and ephemeral dimensions of how people in Jakarta come to reside in the upper stories—stories both in terms of vertical dimensions and narratives that seek to “soar” above the rest. Aspirations, maneuvers, tricks, calculations, and delusions all seem to make room for each other, as...
Characters-Part Three
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...
Characters--Part Two
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...
Characters--Part One
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...
April 2012
4 posts
Matters of Size
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...
Phantom Market
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...
Where can you go from Gao?
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...
When the urban revolution comes, will there be...
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...
March 2012
4 posts
When the urban revolution comes, will there be...
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...
When the urban revolution comes, will there be...
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...
Prayers in Berlin--part two
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...
prayers in berlin--part one
In the run up to the contentious Senegalese elections on February 26, thousands of mostly young people have taken to the street under the umbrella of the M-23 movement. In the process of the army trying to control the situation, there was an attack on a zawiyah, a religious gathering place in Senegal. Looking at some of the Dakar blogs in the afermath of the attack, interesting reference is...
February 2012
3 posts
we got world? part two
The legacy left by colonialism was that there was a postcolonial world to be elaborated and defended. This was a world to be further developed, its sovereignty secured, and its people cohered as one. It was to be developed both in counter-distinction and in concurrence with the West. I was something to be sufficiently different from that which interrupted the emerging nation’s own former...
we got world? part one
In the conclusion to a recent book edited with Aihwa Ong, Ananya Roy re-appropriates the notion of the postcolonial, not as a description of an urban condition, but as a means of pursuing new lines of urban research and theory. As overarching concepts of urbanization have been constructed as isomorphic with the experiences of Western cities, it is more important to understand how these cities...
January 2012
4 posts
Endurance part two
Endurance means something different than survival. A lot of emphasis has been placed upon how residents, particularly the large numbers of urban poor survive the city. Sometimes their survival efforts are realistically acknowledged—a great deal of resilience and street smarts are demonstrated under otherwise debilitating conditions. The celebratory albeit sometimes gets out of hand and the...
Endurance part one
Descriptions of urban life tend to focus on various agencies and structures and the play between them. Residents inhabit, navigate, and shape the city—they do something to it, with it within the constraints imposed by the decisions and forces exerted by different collective actors—whether they are forms of production, institutions, transactions, or ecological processes. Such action assumes the...
In the mix--part two
The plurality of materialized effort—and the putting of things into motion; getting something out of the effort that has been materialized—can provoke conflict. Some efforts are not easily translatable, and some actors are sometimes not even interested in having their efforts understood, as they try to dominate space and cut off the need to respond to what others are doing. But the way in...
In the mix: part one
Across much of Jakarta, it seems that a huge container, full of stuff of all sorts, textures, and sizes, has been tipped over and strewn across the landscape. While this hodge-podge certainly to a large extent can be traced back to scores of particular decisions and accommodations, the surface arrangements have no particular rhyme or reason. They are emplaced in contiguities that make little...
December 2011
4 posts
The Ghosts of Tebet Part 2
When I tried to argue that it seemed that the neighborhood shut down prematurely at night for no apparent good reason, and thus seemed to shout out its simplicity rather than complication, the group of guards insisted that people these days had to increasingly retreat to their dreams in order to come up with new ways of doing things; that Jakarta had already become more complicated—constant...
The Ghosts of Tebet...part one
I live in a lower middle class neighborhood centrally located in Jakarta. Tebet is a warren of small streets with mostly single family pavilions tightly packed together. It was originally developed some fifty years ago as neighborhoods in Senayoran were displaced to make room for a new sporting complex and governmental district. The area is popularly known as seasoned, street wise “combatant”...
was blind and still not see
Butchie acts blind to what he sees, but he sees anyway. He is not the repository of an archival wisdom; he is not a hold-over from another generation; he does not issue cautionary tales or deliver cogent oral histories.
Rather, Butchie sees how the changes in the game, the “passing” of the old orders are not really that at all. He sees the ways in which self-destruction simply does not...
November 2011
3 posts
The lower regions
In environments where many things don’t work, are broken down, are even beyond recognition through overuse and lack of upkeep, it is easy for certain things to lose meaning or substance. So trying to keep things intact as a shelter against the easy parasitism of both desperate and powerful others, economy is a device to keep the value of things open to new uses and sites. Thus, to grasp the...
the upper regions
Recently, I lived for one year on the 39th floor in one of the fifteen towers making up Podomoro City in Jakarta. I rarely saw my neighbors. Even more rarely ever had any kind of conversation with them. The first person on my floor I ever spoke with was a middle aged woman from Abidjan. I stupidly asked how it was for an Ivorian woman living in Indonesia, and she replied that on the 39th...
Next of Kin2
image Cedric Nzolo
As preaching, policing, politicking, servicing, informing, mediating, reconciling, buying and selling come together in a mix where it is sometimes not clear what kind of activity is As trading precisely going on—simply because they all may be taking place at once and through a variety of actors who are switching their roles at “high speeds”—there are opportunities for many...
October 2011
3 posts
next of Kin
image Mowoso
Daily rhythms and scenarios will usually drudge along in the formats in which they are long familiar. It is not as if the look and the characters of the immediate surroundings are remade with any great disjunction—few additions to either built environment, economic or social activity take place. At the same time there is a paucity of evidence for exactly how what remains and...
The light
At the heart of the black city is the tactile composition of light, something to be felt, not seen.
Allah is the light of the heavens and of the earth. The parable of His light is as if there were a niche and within it a lamp; the lamp enclosed in glass; the glass as it were a brilliant star: Lit from a blessed tree, an olive; neither of the east or the west; whose oil is well-nigh luminous,...
white city?
Is there a white city, a city that could be white, that could exist in or as whiteness, without perforation, shadow, the infolds and ridges and interruptions. The sentiment for the perfect sentence, the ultimate design, the state where one need not say anything more. But where the veneer seems to promise coherence—everything seamlessly related to each other—a monstrous curiosity is...
September 2011
4 posts
Keep moving
For urban residents who believe that their present and futures rest largely in their hands—whose livelihoods have to take place across a broader expanse of space, work sectors, and networks, it is important to keep moving. Go somewhere, even if it means staying in the same place. Everything becomes insufficient—work, residence, connections, resources. It may be enough for now, but...
Angels 2
Sammy Baloji
New jobs for the city. For it is always a question of what and who works. What counts as work. Then Angel, a switcher, tried to cut paths across the territories underneath bridges and flyovers, underneath the surfaces of rapid transmissions and speedy recoveries. To bring hesitation and leakage. Spending hours braiding the the nappy and greying hairs of elderly women moving the...
