Villes-Noires

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.