Villes-Noires

Stories from "Tampa"--Part One

Thu, 23 May 2013 04:05:14 -0400

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 domesticated. Many settlements were situated at the confluence of water sources, river and sea, and it was this proximity which rendered the shore an ever-shifting land mass, a staging area for both the conveyance of fresh nutrients for soil and the evacuation of sediments. Ebb and flow were the rhythms of articulation, always situating settlements to somewhere else, where efficacy was contingent upon the lines upstream and downstream, on-shore, offshore; the inhabitation of an in-between.

Yet, eventually, this hydrological metabolism was shifted in the production of land. Moving away from the shore and the riverbanks, catchment areas were filled-in. Dikes were built, so that territory could be reclaimed from the water. Here the riverine confluences, the rise and fall of silted shores, backwash and flooding are set aside or instrumentally used as markers of social division for manufactured landscapes.

Terrain is made to anchor the consolidation of claims over the elsewhere that had heretofore existed as complement or volatile potential. The colonial apparatuses that were reluctant to either venture too far from the seas or simply viewed vast interiors as the sources of things and mysteries to be evacuated became proficient engineers for the production of land. But consider how much this invented land has had to bear over centuries, how much it has been tied into more extensive circuits of exchange now reflected in overbuilding or in the massive collection of populations on the most vulnerable thresholds between land and water. As a result, many of the world’s largest metropolitan areas are increasingly vulnerable to flooding, whose intensity and frequency are likely to deliver incapacities for which these cities are not prepared. Cities like Jakarta, Bangkok, Manila, Lagos, Phnom Penh, to say nothing of coastal American cities, are threatened with aquatic invasions of their own making.

Land has often been felt as a defense against restlessness. It was a vehicle to stake futures and assign destinies. Unlike the vast interiors where land was once in excess to how it could be conceived and parceled, the production of land in the cities built on deltas, swamps, isthmuses, confluences, and shores seemingly had to be tied down at the onset of their very existence. Even if not propertied as such, they were to generate certain myths of origin and propriety. They might incubate hybrid identities and etch out lists of eligibilities, but they were to be marked in some way. The use of invented urban land has established conditions of modernity, particularly as it was rendered into an instrument of reflexivity. Land continuously commented upon its own worth and value, and signaled participation in a domain of identification that seemed not to depend on the flows of water to link one place to another. In Phnom Penh construction moved increasingly inland, rather than along the transversals of waterways. Construction projected rectilinear grids of concrete and stone buildings, as opposed to the traditional use of wood. By 1894 the most significant canal projects were completed, which effected the literal encircling of a European quarter (Shelby Doyle 2012).

But despite this defense against restlessness and the way that land functions to compel the immobility of abstract labor, cities are restless. Phnom Penh was a particularly restless city in the five or so years leading up to its virtual emptying in 1976 at the onset of the Khmer Rouge’s fantasies of capital cleansing. Inflows of refugees from bombed-out countryside had nearly doubled its population with people who knew little about how to operate in cities. The preceding decade where the head of state, Norodom Sihanouk, filled the city’s land with spatial products embodying a cutting edge tropical modernism was increasingly littered with the improvised existences of newcomers and a sweeping dissatisfaction with the inability of these spatial products to thwart insidious corruption or guarantee everyday security (Sylvia Nam 2011).

Still the restlessness had its own ebbs and flows, like liquid rhythms. Phnom Penh until recent years, and with the exception of the years where most of the population was forcefully evicted and the highly regimented reoccupation three years later, was a city where residents spent a great deal of time flowing into each other. Whatever segregations were affected by the French protectorate, the cultivation of an educated elite, or the assignation of ethnicities to particular zones of the city, there had been ample space for residents to spread out, take note of each other’s lives, and mingle without excessive function or precaution in scores of improvised markets, eating places, entertainments, rituals, trades, and conversations.

The Hollows: Tambora Market

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 03:53:50 -0400

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Black Beach--Part Four

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 22:07:42 -0400

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Black Beach--Part Three

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 19:24:40 -0500

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meeting Head-On

Sat, 02 Feb 2013 21:36:25 -0500

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And their eyes were not watching God

Sat, 29 Dec 2012 05:12:21 -0500

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Black Angel of Memory

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 13:44:58 -0500

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Black Beach--part two

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 10:42:00 -0500

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Black Beach--part one

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 10:19:59 -0400

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

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

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

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

Steal Away, Steal Away Back Home

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 10:04:27 -0400

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Succinct and Sloppy Failure: Urbanism from Phnom Penh

Sun, 16 Sep 2012 03:29:59 -0400

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No wasted labs--South Beirut

Sun, 02 Sep 2012 02:16:50 -0400

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 individuals lost in either reverie or anxiety who set out to buy a pack of cigarettes at the corner store and end up chasing smoke through circuitous routes across bars and apartment blocks, office buildings and toilets, public parks and mosques in neighborhoods where they have never been before. On the other hand, they clear away all but the most incisive clutter in order to welcome unanticipated contributions—matters often seen as simply fecal or deleterious, but more often just uncanny or hilarious; matters that complicate the already thankless tasks of managers, accountants and social workers.

Camps are places of endless fascination, with high occupancy rates and low overheads. They are the concretization of the suspension of things not having to become any thing in particular. They are to hang somewhere in mid-air, yet shape the domains and neighborhoods they are ordered to stay away from. In the Shatila Camp in South Beirut set up to house Palestinian refugees in 1949, the residents dwell in multiple suspensions. They are suspended in an absence of citizenship and national belonging where their formal existence is to be circumscribed within the borders of the camp; they are suspended in the memory of the massacres of 1982 by Lebanese Phalangists; they are suspended by the collective determination and fantasy of an eventual return to a liberated Palestine. The camp is largely separated from its surrounds by wasted land, an emphatic punctuation of its supposed singularity.

But this is Beirut, and despite the way in which Beirut appears strictly divided according to confessional community, Beirut is nevertheless a city where things do not stay easily in place. Shatila is now barely Palestinian as Kurds, Iraqis, Syrians, and Armenians use its densely packed lanes, as a medium to slip through the prohibitive procedures and costs that otherwise would keep them from the central city. Institutionalized Palestinian memories and decorative features provide a useful cover for their own fumbling, half-baked initiatives for making functional livelihoods in the city.

Still, many Palestinians are not far away; just “around the corner” in fact, managing lives that are not that different from what might be expected in Bethlehem or Ramallah, except that the occupancy of their apartments, the licensing of their jobs and businesses is actualized under someone else’s name and nationality. While such an arrangement is always accompanied by the vulnerability of dependency, a sense of precariousness about what tomorrow may bring, it is also a resource for the Lebanese neighbors. For after all, the funds that enable both Palestinians and Lebanese to live in Beirut don’t really come from Lebanon. At the level of global parallel and trader economies, Lebanese and Palestinians have pieced together different kinds of markets, routes, sectors, and networks, and those of the Levant—artificial hair factories in Lomé, diamond smuggling in Kinshasa, oil bunkerage in Trinidad, foodstuffs in Dakar, and piracy at Cuidade al Este—tend to stand out; whereas those of Palestine frequently slip through on the “backs” of a wide range of syndicates and games in a willingness to label a whole lot things, “Palestinian.”

The adamant claim of Palestinian identity in many ways is sustained through the very ability to suspend it, let it roam across various arrangements where it seemingly is the subservient partner. But this is partly a ruse for gaining access, for entering spaces where the welcome mat is not displayed in bold letters. Israeli offensive military strategies have prioritized a kind of urban warfare that goes through walls and not on the established thoroughfares. But they may have gotten this from the Palestinians. Especially those living on the middle floors of the building in the last picture above—who seem to know an awful lot about what is taking place in the apartments above and below.

A stone’s throw from Shatila, it is easy to think that the origins and characteristics of such a building is clear, as well as the dynamics of everyday living within. The story would go: Some big property developer got a break on cheap land, particularly given its proximity to the camps, and was able to build huge with limited construction values. The residents are tied down to long-term debt on the purchase of tiny apartments where they can make few adjustments and certainly not add-on space for growing family size or commercial aspirations over time. With the exigency of dealing with indebtedness, cramped quarters and the proprieties of newly acquired middle class status, residents of course keep to themselves. But this story is as much a trick as thinking that camp down the street is something Palestinian. For inside there are stories upon stories whose plots are played out far beyond these walls and where both random and calculated encounters among residents—fixing generators, sharing prayer rooms, ordering drinking water in bulk from wholesale suppliers, avoiding tax auditors, or watching errant children—launch new orbits of circulating money and information.

Wastelands are laboratories that enable the things kept apart to sustain their own sleight of hands—the old, “one-two.” So even if the seemingly disparate respond to the hungers of each other, the veneer of self-sufficiency can persist. Neighborhoods have little to do with harmony anyway.

Espíritos de Salvador

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 02:09:18 -0400

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 beach, domestic intimacies among the disparate and religious syncretism—would seem to promise the easy accommodation of aspirations that have little to do with the specificities of the city’s history. One easily comes across scores of new residents from all over the world who claim the absence of any roots or the desire to lead lives that have little connection to those they have lived before.

That said, this is after all a city of passages. Even the economic boom of recent years is largely dependent upon the revitalized port, the promise of massive gas and oil deposits and “the constant of cane” (sugar ethanol), and the export processing Centro Industrial de Aratu—all components of incessant movement. The ramification of this economy is the near-gridlock of Salvador’s roads. At rush hour, crowds wait in long lines for buses; commuters with cars may pour into beach side bars to wait-out the traffic, with their parked cars further adding to the congestion. Yet, nearly everyone who can afford to drive does so. A key aspect of the popular economy—that which puts bread on the table for the residents of barrios and favelas—is the trade in automobile parts, as well as the repair, stripping and rebuilding of cars. Even the built environment conveys the sense of things on their way somewhere, even when the destination remains unclear. The majority of buildings outside the highly circumscribed “Centro” and the new middle class high-rise developments of the suburbs remain unfinished. It is never clear what this state of being unfinished precisely means—did the inhabitants run out of money, are they concretizing some gesture for the future, or is the absence of completion something that is fully used—made use of for changing, sometimes nebulous purposes?

In a culture of conviviality where residents pass each other in a state of compulsive happiness, it is often difficult to locate where the critical decisions are made and even how decisions are made at all. Across the city’s distinctive districts—upper and lower cities, popular suburbs and favelas—it is unclear who is in charge, even when the stratifications of power and privilege are clearly etched. While the more obvious forms of black subjugation diminish, the expendability of black life remains something thoroughly interwoven into the city’s collective psyche—an expendability which the various practices of conviviality largely manage to conceal, but which the homicide statistics constantly reiterate.

Salvador got its start through its relationship to the plantation. The plantation was a domain of experimentation and innovation, continuously being re-made up as it went along—taking the mundane focus of cultivating a limited number of primary commodities or extracting minerals to elaborate a wide range of consumption practices, tastes, indulgence, and disciplines; a vast laboratory for the shaping of bodies and sentiments. Experimentation required the holding of bodies in place, of their enforced labor, and of turning that very labor into a reserve of spiritual and sexual capacity. As such Salvador remains a city of sex and saints, the salacious and the spiritual, and all the mixtures of righteousness and corruption that inevitably ensue from these surface dualities. These representations will of course obscure all of the hard work many residents do day in and day out to keep themselves and the city running. Young men and women, easily mistaken for unemployed emissaries of thug life, work long hours as clerks, technicians, health workers, and salespersons. The number of undergraduates has nearly doubled in the past decade. The massive deterioration of health common in the favela through bad diet, constant anxiety about security and poor urban services is being abated, albeit through sometimes draconian measures of population surveillance.

Still, all of the fantasies now being inserted into the city—fantasies about the intense proximity of urban and natural environments, of the distillations of African magic that can now grace new projects of all kinds, of the fluid rhythms of music, sex, the beach, the institutionalized compulsion for things to go easy—still depend upon at least the memorialized traces of slavery, on a captured urban labor force. The experiments with new life styles, new dreams and new beginnings still find lines of connection to the plantation. This is what happens when the dissociation from a past, when the willing of a new imaginary, a new era, when the preoccupation with experimentation all require an undergirding from a wasting of other life. The growth of Salvador—in all aspects of its economy of passages—brings new skills to many of its inhabitants. But in a way that continues to de-skill many other residents, dissociating them from the toolboxes that built a city in face of arbitrary violence and colonial rule—violence and rule that could never have built a city that endures.

Policy games and Preman--Part Two

Sat, 11 Aug 2012 19:59:00 -0400

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 these designations have as well. But more importantly, the popular understanding of what constitutes the authority of premen to operate across so many ambiguities and sectors is their willingness to act as the repositories of stories.

While preman will have interests and turf to defend—both theirs and the various parties they may come to work for—they also know that their maneuverability largely derives from the persuasiveness of the narratives they generate about how people within a particular purview—a market, neighborhood, or economic sector—are connected to each other, how they are implicated in each other’s lives.

Premen rarely sit behind closed doors; they assemble most often in places that make them highly visible, and which for them, give them opportunistic vantage points to witness what is going on. They are “exposed to the elements” as a popular saying goes; they watch what comes and goes, and one of their major “businesses” is to regulate various flows of coming and going—in markets, traffic intersections, entertainment districts. But again, the most important activity is the gathering of stories. They sit in warungs and kaki lima, markets, mosques, and warehouses, offer snacks, cigarettes, and small loans, and garner pieces of gossip, news and reports.

People will, in turn, ask for their impressions as to what is going on and who might be behind certain events. They will ask for information about what property might be for sale, what official might be persuaded to cooperate in particular venture, how to expedite an application, where a particular volume of goods might be accessed at a good price, where a spouse may be spending their time, or what specific figures in the neighborhood are doing elsewhere. Sometimes people will ask for help intervening into troubling situations, to “straighten out” recalcitrant bosses or employees, neighborhoods or relatives. Premen will use the links they have cultivated across the city to supplement for information they don’t know or to intervene into situations beyond their immediate competency.

As the “attractors” of stories, and without owing any overarching obligation to anyone in the way these stories are assembled and intersected, premen can shape the narrative threads in many different ways, and do so in order to bring many different actors within a common orbit. The intent of the narration isn’t so much to represent events and daily life according to strictures of official intelligibility or in tropes that favour the ranking hierarchies of sense and authority within a given district. The intent isn’t to stick close to a linear unfolding of temporality, where the sequence of events is rendered in a strict order of “before and after”—a process that tends to favour “causes” that protect the alignments of power and meaning that residents are accustomed to. Rather, the accounts are often uncanny, speculative readings of what might be transpiring behind the visible chain of associations.

While premen may be relied upon for an authoritative account of what is taking place based on their exposure to multiple events and angles, to the long hours spent watching what is unfolding around them, to the steps they take to intervene in trouble and conflict, and their opportunistic seizing of unanticipated openings, the accounts they usually render fall outside of the conventional assumptions about what makes accounts authoritative.

In a city, where the exigencies of survival tend to now dissociate individuals and households, premen are likely to give accounts that pull them back together into various mutuality, at times inventing accounts of how the actions on the parts of different individuals are related to each other, and, at times, actively intervening to stage scenarios where those implications are performed. If for example, residents are worried that a new business on their lane is going to fill the area with unwanted traffic, premen may actually stage a scenario where trucks break down in the area, clog the street, and force the new business venture to reconsider.

But usually the actions are more nuanced, where premen will incessantly hint, rumour, and suggest in ways that implant a sense of caution or determination, a sense of being emboldened or restrained. Everything the premen uses comes from the surround and it will have some degree of resonance with the recipient of the narrative no matter how it is arranged. All the premen do is to reflect back to an audience that which the audience have themselves provided but in ways that destabilize the sense of what that audience thought was going on and what it is possible to do in relationship to it. Such is the game of policy.

Policy games and Preman--Part One

Sat, 28 Jul 2012 01:11:00 -0400

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 longer a metaphor for an opaque space between the figures of dominant visibility, but the turbulent leftovers produced by different trajectories of intensely discordant urban growth. It is easy to be convinced that city life is heading in a more convergent, unified direction, and there is evidence for this.

But with such evidence, it is all the more striking that minor differences can be so powerful, inequities so pronounced. Poverty is being successfully addressed and ignored; wellbeing is increasing, as is the intensity of dissatisfaction and alarm. The images of people as objects of class position, cultural, national and religious identity, expressions of probabilistic behaviour, risk and development “careers”, and indicators of complex configurations of demographic, biochemical and biopolitical variables are containers through which life is enacted. Yet, they all are inadequate modes of enunciation for how urban life is experienced and acted upon. What Deleuze suggests in his observations of cinema is a way of trying to creatively posit a sensory, cognitive and discursive relationship with the city that generates lines of commonality, conveyance, and intensity among different facets of urban life that on the surface and in convention are either not amenable or eligible for such lines.

Deception, then, provokes thought. What is visible is not necessarily intelligible and what is intelligible is not necessarily visible. The apparent certainties of the past dissipate rapidly in the very forms that are better able to document and preserve them (technological proficiencies) as these modalities of preservation entangle them in thickets of vast cross-referencing that make it almost impossible for them to retain any discrete autonomy. All kinds of questions are thus raised about exactly what happened; how did we get here?

Likewise, the elaboration of the future is already crowded with the concretizations of anticipation and speculation that assume the form of mega-developments and long-term indebtedness, much of which will inevitably have to be converted to something else. So how do urban inhabitants navigate the excessive piling up of significations of the past and the leveraged buy-outs of deceptively homogenous futures? The device of policy continues to be important as a facilitator of this navigation, as long as we consider it as an inventive method—a method invented to accomplish a sense of interrelatedness amongst things that may indeed be interrelated but where the grasp of this interrelationship either lacks an available language or can only be demonstrated in highly abstract ways that make it difficult for inhabitants to do something in relationship to them.

Let me take the figure of the preman that is pervasive throughout Jakarta. In its most simplistic rendering, the word means “freeman”—someone without substantial social ties that was available for protracted renegade warfare against colonial authority; someone who need not garner respect or social capital in predetermined ways and thus who can engage in various underhanded activities. In the postcolonial period this figure could be mobilized for different purposes by competing political authorities. But premen have been generally vilified as thugs, and often seem to exaggerate and relish in this connotation. In popular vernacular, preman is often simply a criminal, and a criminal who tends to originate from the more marginal parts of the Indonesian archipelago, such as Ambon, Flores, or Papua, thus taking on a racial dimension as well.

Yet, in the contemporary history of Jakarta urban politics, the preman has been an important figure largely in part because he remains “free” of being tied down to a specific, overarching definition. Any definitive rendering inevitably acts as a “deception.” The preman is criminal, entrepreneur, philanthropist, enforcer, local political leader, gambler, sage, mercenary, guerrilla, mediator, broker, entertainer, conciliator, historian, insider, and outsider. Any specific preman commonly embodies contradictory roles, and these divergent roles are worked as foils for each other. While any totalizing signification ends up producing a deceptive result, the preman himself doesn’t deceive as much as he produces a sense of uncertainty as to what is taking place; he embodies the condition that things may not be what they appear to be, may not be graspable by simply eliminating considerations and networks of associate that might appear tangential or immune from such associations to the condition or event being considered. In this way, the uncertainty approximates the reality of the situation, and the preman is constituted as the figure which enables this reality to be thought about and engaged.

It is by definition a volatile preoccupation. During the three decades of the New Order, the preman both symbolized the degree to which an unpopular government could reach deep inside urban neighbourhoods and the degree to which urban neighbourhoods could also exist out its reach. Specific “regimes” of “premanship” will assume particular directions: some preman will terrorize a district with violent, highly exploitative rackets; some will mobilize collaborative relationships among enterprises of different sizes and ways of working but which all produce for the same market; some will encourage landowners to hold onto their property and mobilize the resources that enable them to do so; some will expedite the evacuation of an area, applying pressure on local residents to sell property; some will facilitate cooperative activities and balances among distinct ethnic and regional groupings in a neighbourhood; some will foster conflict among them. Additionally, premen may circulate through different districts; different projects and “styles of management” will be articulated, with both intricate competitions and complicities.

As both the purveyors of insecurity and the guarantors of security, security becomes much less a defensive proposition than a risk-laden maneuver of experimental triangulations and conjunctions among actors and activities that are not usually viewed as compatible or relevant. This is important since it means that in order for many residents to attain a sense of stability and to consolidate perhaps hard won gains they will have to extend their interest and consideration into areas of activity and decision-making that on the surface may not seem to have any obvious relationship to them, just as they, themselves, become potentially implicated in maneuvers which they could reasonably assume they have nothing to do with. What then on a macro-urban level are the twists and turns of wildly different futures, developments, imaginations and memories mingling with each other in seemingly arbitrary companionship are translated into the exigencies of seeing urban life in more provisional, speculative, and sometimes impulsive ways at the level of households and neighbourhoods.

The enchantments of occupation--part four

Thu, 05 Jul 2012 11:23:47 -0400

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 nowhere, flashing lights that continue even when the switches are turned off, elevators that skip floors, mirrors suddenly dislodged from their mountings, car alarms that go off by the hundreds in parking garages, or doors the refuse to open with the proper keys.

The maintenance personnel sometimes see evidence of these events, but mostly engage the panic of those who report having witnessed them, discovering nothing amiss themselves when they arrive at the scene. At first they thought that residents were simply taking them for fools and that they were unwitting participants in a collective joke proffered by the well-off at their own expense.

But the alarm expressed by many residents was real, as was the lengths to which residents would sometimes go to avoid these events—seeking to break rental contracts, arrange quick sales, or even hire private security personnel to watch over their abodes. Most of the time, residents would slip the maintenance personnel a sizable sum of money simply to keep their reports private. Fearing that they were being enrolled as the front line in some invisible war whose agendas and weapons were beyond their comprehension, maintenance personnel were reluctant to get overly involved, even though by the time I spoke with most of them they had been dealing with these occurrences for some time.

It was clear to them that something was wrong; that there was much more to these developments then met the eye. They were well familiar with layouts, designs, and conduits—the infrastructure of the interior; after all they were called upon to make constant repairs of problems whose origins were quite clear. But they also reported that there was something about these developments that they didn’t quite grasp; that there were vacancies, gulches, and other nebulous spaces that were to be expected of complexes this size. Given the expansiveness of the space, it was difficult to anticipate the effects that the ingestion and exhalations of bodies and machines, the turning off and on of so many operations, and the frictions generated in the convergence of so many different technical operations and materiality could generate.

Then there were so many maintenance personnel, who, in combination with other service workers—from domestics, cleaners, deliverers, and security guards—would produce many stories about what was taking place, and thus arguments amongst themselves about not only how the complex functioned but the source of the difficulties as well. Consensus was difficult to come by, and sometimes mistrust developed amongst themselves over who might be “gaming” the system to their advantage.

Whatever the veracity of such occurrences, and whether they can be dismissed as a form of collective hysteria or an extension of the preoccupation with ghosts that sometimes sweeps over the entire city during moments of silent, gnawing crisis, these mega-complexes are full of varied retentions. They are infused with different memories and traumas, aspirations and anxieties and markedly varied assessments of the past and the places in which that past took place. Residents see themselves as extensions, revisions, and abruptions of particular trajectories of making urban life work, and all of these co-exist uneasily in a setting where there are few devices to translate them to each other.

The overarching compaction of differences into a standardized lingua franca of residence that purports to speak to a transurban world far from Jakarta itself, across borders of culture, history and politics, is often devoid of texture, since it is intended to subsume almost whatever comes its way. With mediation largely resting only in the abstracted form of an ephemeral transurban professional class solidarity, with its emphasis on individuation from social and historical specificity but without much of a content of its own, there is little to prevent the discordant dramas and baggage that residents bring with them from provocations with uncertain consequences; where discordant retentions and preoccupations incite one another into unrecognizable shapes and diffuse spectral events.

Far from being withdrawn from the city, these mega-complexes end up functioning as massive arenas where sediments and sentiments of all kinds perturb each other. They perturb each other in ways that the relational and institutional thickness—forged by long histories of familiarity, economic practice and social collaboration (real or not)—which prevails in other parts of the city tends to temper and shape. This multiplicity of frictional retentions exerts a force—even if it exists at the level of a powerful myth about strange infrastructural occurrences.

In this way the mega-complex may operate not so much as the antagonist to the historical working class and lower middle class district, nor as its extension. Rather, it exists as some part-object, neither part of these districts nor apart from them; perhaps as some monstrous figure that the districts themselves had a hand in creating; something that takes on the work that is perhaps too dangerous for them to do, but ultimately part of the long tradition of speculation they have undertaken, and like any speculation, threatens to get out of hand.

The enchantments of occupation--part three

Sun, 24 Jun 2012 00:02:07 -0400

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 prior to initial occupancy.

At the same time, occupancy can be managed in different ways regardless of the availability of bodies to actually inhabit the apartments. Property developers commonly report near-full occupancy rates on most commercial and residential properties. While it is often difficult to verify these claims, even when available records seem to demonstrate their veracity, such rates can be accomplished through various financial sleights of hand.

One maneuver entails using holding companies established by the developers to purchase units in bulk, negotiate favorable mortgages from banks, in which the developers themselves may be important investors, and then securitize these mortgages with an array of other loans—some of which may include mortgages, but also loans for industrial and infrastructural development—which then pay out at interest rates that exceed the costs of the mortgages themselves. This manufacturing of the “success” of a given project then allows developers to entice other investors to pay premium rates for space that is supposedly “going fast.” At times, potential prestige clients are offered cut-rate deals—e.g., payment deferrals of long-term fixed rated leases; deploying lease payments as investments in joint venture accounts—in order to secure their tenancy, which then is used as a means to attract others.

As units are geared toward investment, with their actual occupancy a secondary consideration, what people do with their investments afterward is much less certain. But these developments are full of actual and potential frictions, as well as the circulation of discordant elements. It is exceedingly difficult to frame any space or activity within its own terms, and the same goes for the framing of the residential base of these developments. The developer may assume that those who live in the complex will have a specific social and professional background as demonstrated through affordability and background checks. But the results of actual occupancy display a different picture.

For example, instead of the young professional couple, childless or, alternatively, with one or two children, apartments can be occupied through multiple levels of subletting. Here, six to ten individuals, related through work or friendship, share a two-bedroom apartment, with the actual composition shifting perhaps even month to month. While existing local government regulations would seem to prohibit these forms of shared occupancy, the regulatory apparatus of local governments were not geared to this form of high-rise living and can in actuality do little about what takes place inside these complexes. While a primary renter may have to produce their Jakarta identity card verifying their eligibility to live in the city, once an apartment is purchased by a buyer and then put out for rent, the owner does not really exert much control over what takes place, particularly as rental contracts are paid for at least one year in advance.

In one of the city’s primary high-end properties, Pacific Place, I have discovered a sophisticated Nigerian computer piracy operation in a luxury three bedroom apartment next to a Singapore fashion designer who brings his secret male lover to Jakarta every other weekend so that his family won’t find out next to the daughter of the former minister of finance who runs a yoga studio for rich housewives next to the estranged family of a clergyman of one of Jakarta’s largest churches next to the wayward daughter of one of the country’s most militant Islamic politicians who has no idea she is living there. Developments vary, of course, in terms of the proportion of units sold, rented, occupied, and kept vacant, as well as in the history of occupation, as some formerly high-end properties now become increasingly affordable to lower-middle class families.

The multiplicity of stories and characters that occupy these complexes is in part attributable to the absence of any need for them to have to fit together at all. As the architecture of habitation and the provisioning of services are standardized, there is little need for cross-negotiation and coordination among residents—not like everyday life in the city’s older residential districts. Many different ways of life are accommodated because in significant ways they are “silenced”—there are no occasions and platforms for them to speak to each other; they do not produce a built environment that singularly expresses their needs, conditions, or aspirations.

Rather, the complex provides a veneer of anonymity that allows the insertion of many different expressions and conditions as long as they do not upend the capacities of others to prolong their own residency. Heterogeneity here is less an instrument through which to shape a large social space but more a process of individuation that enables individuals to address a more diffusely distributed or provisional world of actual or potential interlocutors.

Congregations do occur, but in ways that also not predictable. Restaurants, lounges, and clubs attached to various complexes become venues of interchange, but they go through wild oscillations in popularity. Places that are packed one week as the designated favorites of a young high-society crowd, may be empty the next, and it is usually not clear just what happened. The vast majority of venues are usually relatively empty, and it is often difficult to know where the crowds actually are, as they seem to disappear into increasingly privatized places. In fact, in one high rise in Kunigan City, the entire top floor penthouse, rented out by a businessmen who got his start running a parking lot for a convenience store—but who is known to now dominate the nightclub security business—is styled as a mini-Las Vegas casino full of customers who work for the city’s stock exchange.

Of course the bulk of stories are much more prosaic, full of minor differences in terms of background. But even here, as the majority of residential situations certainly do not convey great exoticism, they do bring with them marked variations in terms of where they come from, who they choose to live with, what they running away from and what they are running toward.

For these complexes are full of different kinds of retentions. This is despite the fact that the homogenizing environment of the mega-complex institutes a form of retention whereby residents—both near and far who share a similar mode of habitation—come to see that they are actually in the “same place”. This approximates what Bernard Stiegler had in mind when he talked about mnemotechnical systems and the synchronization of individual minds. But instead, residents bring with them the residues of all the situations that they have left behind. The new-formed residency then acts a way of working out or, at least eliding the conundrums entailed by these residues.

There is a plurality of conditions left behind. Some entail complicated familial dramas amongst households who can at least afford to displace them through taking up residency across the varied landscape of high-rises. Some entail complicated histories of designation, where one family member as been implicitly selected to venture forth into the “new world” of a comprehensive professional life style while the bulk of the rest of the family remains ensconced in the messiness of self-produced livelihoods and their incessant dance with foreclosure. Some entail escapes from troubles of various kinds in other parts of the country or world; while others are intensely opportunistic, such as the pursuit of high paid expatriate jobs or the exploitation of various loopholes or niche markets. But equally important in significance if not necessary volume, are the exits produced by the workings of Jakarta’s historic and working class districts themselves.

The enchantments of occupation--part two

Sat, 09 Jun 2012 06:21:00 -0400

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 demeanor, connectivity, niche markets, and the management of increasingly abstracted relationships. These do not offer a fully formed content of how individuals are actually going to operate in a transurban world. Occupation and residential form have concretized a means of disentanglement through which a continuously revised and supplemented domain of performance management criteria can be elaborated—adherence to which are believed to ensure professional success, security, and accumulation. These, however, are insufficient to the challenge of individuals being able to register effects uniquely attributable to their participation in this world.

In other words, simply doing the right thing, living in the right place, and dissociating yourself from insignificant attachments and preoccupations does not in itself provide one with the highly individuated performance necessary to innovate rather than comply, create rather than proficiently calculate and, more importantly, to speculate on the possible configurations of connections that could be possible in this state of disentanglement. Speculation is not simply a rational, calculative act. Speculation always entails a certain amount of risk that anticipations and actions will produce outcomes that have little or nothing to do with the dispositions aimed for. As such, devices for carrying, packaging, or embodying risk are needed in order to exert risk.

Risk is something thoroughly woven into the fabric of everyday urban life. Throughout the popular economies of Jakarta, residents would commonly seek to exceed their incomes, livelihoods, and social positions through initiatives of all kinds, by doing something out of the ordinary. For they knew that whatever was sufficient for now—shelter, provisioning, social security—was unlikely to be sufficient in the long-run, given the volatility of urban life; a volatility that ironically intensified through their very means of hedging against it. For a younger, disentangled professional class, risks not only entailed the disentanglement itself, but also a self-fashioning that does more than simply increase financial savings, pursue continuous training and educational opportunities, become proficient in the use of social media, or make sound but potentially high profit investments. Everyday epistemology for them also requires a kind of self-fashioning that can be deployed in highly visible ways but whose outcomes are usually not going to be productive of anything in particular.

Even as more young professionals may now live in mega-complexes, with their enclosed, withdrawn environments; where a resident need not go anywhere except to work in order to have most anything they need, there is also a “rolling out” of many disparate “projects” into the larger environment. Across older working and lower middle class districts, properties are bought up and become small coffee houses, dance studios, video clubs, boutique fashion shops, lounges, specialty food stores, galleries, and artisanal workshops. These are well-familiar forms of gentrification; even when their shelf life is relatively short they have been able to re-value the areas in which they are situated, paving the way for larger real estate developments and bigger money.

This outcome has yet to happen in much of the areas of Jakarta where these projects take place. It may likely happen, but for now their relative significance rests in the expansion of these seemingly unproductive expenditures, with their “hit” or “miss” impact on specific areas and consumers in the city.

Across a wide array of forums and workshops at various levels of government and private enterprise, discussions are replete with the need for identifying more creative forms of productive investment. Now that the Indonesian skill base is well developed, it is widely acknowledged that greater emphasis should be placed on developing new industries and service sectors, identifying innovative entrepreneurial solutions to the critical needs of urban management, infrastructure development, transportation, and consolidating the energies and skill of the vast informal economy into more efficient and lucrative organizational forms.

It is an argument not dissimilar to the criticisms leveled against big developers over the years: why are they able to take their technical capacities and available financial resources in order to develop more adequate water, sewage, power and transportation systems. Why are they not at least more concerned with using their own projects as a means of pioneering more sustainable provisioning technologies?

Even if some developers have signaled their desire to at least make gestures in this direction, infrastructural revisions are enormously costly and complicated. In cities with multiple arrays of networks, often highly differentiated materials composing pipes and cables, as well as divergent measuring and specification systems, coming up with interventions that would integrate and cohere existent infrastructure, extend existent capacity and build new capacity, and make provisioning more equitable across different population groups requires the harmonization of many different sectors of expertise as well as policy and management institutions.

The logic whereby developers are simply allowed to do their own thing regardless of whether it fits into existing spatial development plans, municipal by-laws, zoning requirements, or resource management guidelines prevails in part because it results in living environments where the complexities of the city’s material articulations and disarticulations don’t have to be paid attention to. With their recessed and vertical optics, an overview of the city becomes as aesthetic dimension that obscures the messiness on the ground and underneath it. This ocular politics sustains the illusion that as long as the creative, professional, political, and expatriate class is housed and serviced in environments vulnerable to only minimal interference from the larger city, than that larger city’s effect on the city as a whole is reduced; it ceases to matter as much, and it, then, can become a site where actions undertaken in that larger city also do not much matter.

Of course, this dismissal is not entirely the case. Whereas past recent decades attempted largely to remove the poor, the working and lower middle classes from the equation of urban productivity and growth, there is widespread recognition amongst economists, policymakers, and politicians that they need to be factored back in. Thus, the predominance of now widely institutionalized policy mechanisms that provide conditional cash transfers to the poor as long as they adhere to specific disciplinary guidelines—e.g. send their kids to school, make sure they have adequate diets, etc.

One of the major concerns of the near-gridlock traffic situation that exists in Jakarta is its deleterious impact on the small and medium scale economies relied upon by a large segment of the urban population to put food on the table. So there is widespread concern about what kind of work opportunities will be available in the future, especially as more residents are squeezed out of the central city, and thus the accompanying locational advantages.

Still, even with this renewed concern about the “urban question”—i.e. about how to shelter, feed, educate, and service an urban population whose presence is depended upon to keep the basic machinery of the city’s physical and economic infrastructure going—there is a widespread conviction that the highly textured and complex ecological and social systems of Jakarta’s heterogeneous districts do not matter. As they do not matter, they are then available for the expression of risks for those who now consider that they do not live in the worlds of these districts, but instead consider themselves living in a world whose ecologies are simultaneously intensely transparent and opaque. Risks can be taken but without risking much. Properties can be acquired as temporary playgrounds, as arenas to experiment with different kinds of construction and use. While these activities can be criticized as an absence of productive investment, productivity is indeed itself a costly and complicated venture.

Like the challenges posed by large-scale infrastructural development, productive activities require negotiations, planning, and integration of different actors, agendas, practices of calculation, and ways of doing things. Much of the reason why historical, heterogeneous neighborhoods in Jakarta worked as “economic machines” was that they configured built environments that concretized different channels of accumulation, aspirations, materials, designs, and implications for how bodies and senses would be instantiated within them in the same place. This required continuous recalibration and adjustments that could not be initiated and performed by any one group or individual, but necessitate different “teams” of varied social compositions. Differentiated strivings and assessments took concrete form and the resultant perturbance engendered long-term histories of conflict and collaboration that in turn provided work and circuits of interchange, while maintaining certain autonomous responsibilities for individual residents and households.

For outsiders, either new or returning to the districts of their childhood, attempts to engineer productive investments not only have to confront the difficulties of piecing together the requisite permits, finances, cooperation, organization structures, and capacities necessary to make the investment work. They must also impose a logic of organization that is not readily consonant with long-standing practices of efficacy. While international policy trends have long emphasized the need for the rationalization of investment procedures, governance and legal frameworks, “real” governance in cities like Jakarta has long depended upon the subcontracting of management to a wide assortment of various authorities, both formal and informal. When sizable amounts of income are produced through the various forms of rent, fee collection, licensing, certification, authorization, and unofficial payments to the various strata that connect or avoid discrete agencies and institutions, it is nearly impossible to impose an overarching rationalization of the governance system.

Things can happen quickly when either the multiplicity of these authorities are aligned at a specific local level, or conversely isolated from getting involved at all, but the kind of protracted planning, deliberation, and bureaucratic navigation necessary for most so-called productive investments requires lengthy time horizons and can be interrupted and set-back at any moment by the sheer number of regulations and players involved. Rather, the tendency is to inject these districts of Jakarta with a wide range of small, seemingly unproductive projects. But even if these projects don’t turn out much of a profit and absorb increasingly amounts of a person’s disposable income in order to keep them afloat, they are devices of speculation in that they seek to attract and consolidate not only already existent networks of friends and associates, but others in the city both “like them” but also, potentially, different as well.

The play among these older, often declining properties would be much greater if not for the “anachronisms” of Indonesian property law. One of the ironies of the rapid expansion of high-rise apartment provisioning is that many properties across the city stand either vacant or underutilized simply because inheritance and resale dynamics are so difficult to clearly resolve. If, for example, a married couple owns a house and then one by one pass away, it is quite possible that the eventual disposition of the property will be tied down in protracted negotiations among the offspring and close kin in terms of competing rights and claims.

While it is possible for individuals to draw wills that specify inheritance rights, this is rarely done as the drafting of a will is widely viewed in the family as an expression of an immanent death—something that is not to be recognized. While family position, such as firstborn, accords certain priorities to individuals in terms of the disposition of property, specific intentions to sell can be challenged by any family member who can demonstrate either a direct connection to the property and who can demonstrate that their resources were applied to the acquisition of the property in the first place.

Families would conventionally attempt to avoid these dilemmas by relegating part of an overall plot to each given child, so that when the parents died their part of the plot would be simply sold and the proceeds equally divided. In other instances, families built properties large enough to accommodate the anticipated families of their offspring. Yet, despite these practices, many disputes do occur, as particular family members are either reluctant to relinquish the ancestral home, insist upon waiting for an eventual higher sale price, or seek some other way through which their needs or claims are to be accommodated. The end result is that a large number of properties remain vacant or only partially used.

It is also not uncommon for residents of these older inner city districts to have other homes at the periphery of the city, and where they may only stay on weekends or other special occasions. These houses in the periphery, or in areas that were once the periphery but now fall within a ring of inner suburbs, were built as “dream houses” on land that was at the time cheaply available. But because they were located at some distance from work and the social networks upon which residents largely relied, they were not viewed as places of permanent residence, at least until retirement age. They may have been built with all of the household’s savings and/or borrowed against future savings.

As long as these houses existed; as long as households were able to actually build a house of their dreams, it didn’t matter much that where they actually lived most of the time was either subject to rapid deterioration, was crammed and crowded, or situated in extremely dense areas. Sometimes this realization of aspiration elsewhere meant that residents were more reluctant to expend time and resources at neighborhood improvement. Investing in improved living conditions was not as important as investments in the economic relationships that had largely funded their ability to build the “dream” house in the first place. For those who now shift their residence to the mega-complexes, there is to be the conjoining of actual residence and dream; that one combines the locational advantage of being in the central city, close to work and amenities with the possibility of occupying something of status and prestige.

Local media in Jakarta is full of stories about young entrepreneurs that may hold down a full time job as an investor banker but also run a small boutique café on the side, through which they were able to meet other professionals they did not know and then to have subsequent conversations about the possibilities of joint ventures or start-up companies. These projects constitute a kind of currency that is put into play as a means of forming specific groups of friends and associates within which new entrepreneurial activities might incubate, but also might not.

In a city where fine dining, clubbing, fashion design, media, and cultural events have been dominated by large business groupings, the availability of underutilized spaces across the city has been an important means of decentralizing the grip on leisure time by the very same groups that are major partners to the developers that build the complexes in which many of these young professionals now live. Thus, the incursion of these projects into districts surrounding the mega-complex becomes a form of leakage away from their pretenses of self-containment.

These pretenses though remain just that. For even as the mega-complex withdraws from its surroundings, it exerts a large footprint far beyond its confines just in terms of the resources consumed as well as other environmental impacts, such as contributions to accelerating rates of subsidence. But the mega-complex also has no intention to withdraw, as withdrawal becomes a device through which it is able to exert an impact on the city far beyond its means, vision, and capability. Not only does the mega-complex take up sizeable chunks of space, it does so without adding much to the productive capabilities of the city itself. Its profitability relies upon its deployment of various forms of modularity—in design, construction, and management. It rarely matches what it concretely avails in terms of residential possibility to either real market assessments of need or to the styles of varied potential occupancy, instead assuming a basic homogeneity in terms of how the spaces it provides will be used.

The value of what mega-complexes consume in terms of discounted land, tax abatement, infrastructure subsidy, and regulation relaxation often exceeds the value of that which is plowed back into governmental coffers. These complexes not only reshape how residents see the urban landscape but acts as a device which convinces many residents that the way in which they have led their life in the city is soon coming to an end even when there is not other concrete evidence for it. Mega-complexes are also a testimonial to the weight of undomesticated money. Even when most developers raise funds through legal, if not always transparent and accountable means, such developments also exist as the most effective means of regularizing illicit money.

Jakarta is full of examples of where corrupted funds end up. Thus, as indicated before, occupancy is not necessarily a required component of the “success” or viability of a given project. In some cases, it will have done its job regardless of whether anyone lives there or not. Of course, the management of impressions will require that at least a certain percentage of the building is occupied, and often times the conditions of that occupancy are flexible and provisional.

The enchantments of occupation--part one

Thu, 31 May 2012 06:48:34 -0400

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 every format of power is haunted by the the gaps it tries to suture.

Custodial jobs within the proliferating mega-developments of Jakarta come at a premium these days, as there are plentiful opportunities to supplement otherwise meager salaries. Many of these developments certainly were hastily constructed, as profitability requires adherence to strict schedules and price ranges for material inputs. Considerations of market volatility maintain high rates of keep up fast construction speeds, as the relative success of a given project depends heavily on the rate of turnovers in units before they are even completed. So within completed buildings, things go wrong and need to be repaired; this is all in a day’s work. But there are profusions of events where the efficacy of available interventions is much less certain and stretch the capacities of any technical personnel. Before talking about this domain of strange events, there will first be a long detour looking at some of the important features of these mega-complexes.

For, these strange events are related to the contingencies of occupancy. In a city where thousands of new high-rise residential units are coming onto the market every year, the modalities of how they are actually occupied vary. It is well known that the economics of such developments already factor in absentia; in other words, some units may never be occupied or only occupied at some future time when personal situations, money, and even, the stars, are in some kind of optimal alignment.

Before anything, many of these projects exist primarily as a claim—a claim on space that is calculated to posit the significant gains only at some future time, yet have to be claims that are concretized and “implanted” now in order to access such future possibilities. Additionally, prospects of more integrated and systematic infrastructural planning always loom on the horizon. This is a prospect that would necessitate developers to interweave their projects within existent and emergent articulations to contiguous territories—whether the form of articulation is that of infrastructure reticulation, cross-subsidies, or land use planning.

As stands, most of these developments pay little heed to how they relate to and impact on surrounding areas. They strive to function as much off the grid of public service provision as possible, in keeping with their offering of a self-contained and enclosed environment. While each development may be marketed as a singular experience of consumption, there is little to distinguish from one another. The offer a withdrawn, or at least recessed, world of living, is what counts, even as the supposed self-sufficiency relies upon the modular provision of the same retail outlets, design standards, recreational facilities, and so forth.

Marketing pitches do offer developments as the platform undergirding specific lifestyles. These are the lifestyles of the highly individuated professional household, disentangled from the continuous complications of extended family livelihoods, and who have their eyes squarely on the procedures necessarily for self-advancement and equipping themselves with the accoutrements necessary to convey their accruing status and capacities to networks of known and yet-to-be known peers. In the recessed environment of the mega-development, there are theoretically no messy neighborhood management issues to be deliberated; the experiences of other residents are to exert little impact over how individuals conduct their affairs.

The potentialities inherent in the intense densification of residential experiences are heavily codified through the very acts of withdrawing the development from the local surrounds. Conversely, just how the development is to be articulated to that surrounds is specified through strictly delimited modes of access, and by folding in most of what residents need to consume within the confines of the development itself—the usual supermarkets, cinemas, coffee outlets, retail stores. The potentialities of density are also structured through the specification of available spaces, where very little in terms of possible use is left to chance.

While developments are marketed as a way of living in the midst of a chaotic, vibrant city, while enfolding the security, tranquility and ease associated with suburban life, spillages of all kinds seep across the lines that otherwise attempt to divide inside from out. While mega-residential complexes may withdraw themselves from entanglements with the larger surrounds, they do so in part to affect a heightened connection with the larger global urban world—a world whose specificity rests largely in the simultaneous proliferation of such residential contexts. A resident of Jakarta seeking professional mobility and status not only competes with fellow Indonesians but with a larger world of urban professionals whose relative capacities are important criteria for the circulation of investment, services, and opportunities.

The more such professionals distance themselves from the vagaries of day to day negotiations with family, neighbors, and associates over different obligations, expected reciprocities and involvement with the problems of others, the more they are able to concentrate on better positioning themselves in a larger world of increasingly abstract work whose participants include larger numbers of people. The contours and conditions of these people are not readily available to be scrutinized directly. But by situating oneself within the enclosed world of a mega-residential complex, it is possible to anticipate what they are and what they are capable of doing, because what they have in common is a highly standardized residential environment.

Professionals in Bombay, Taipei, Sao Paulo and Jakarta don’t need to actually deal with each other directly to acquire a confidence that each fundamentally shares a similar world, and that their actual transactions, if they were to ever take place, would be primarily informed by an equivalent set of aspirations and commitment to particular practices and an ethos of self-presentation. Residents of such complexes then implicitly know that the specific conditions of history, culture, and politics that characterize their individual cities—while of course remaining determinant of individual character and possibility in many ways—are not the overarching determination of who they come to be. Without direct evidence of who people are, convictions about their characters then are a matter of speculation.

Day to day transactions over how to best provide for one’s household, take advantage of new opportunities for information, material inputs, or potentially important social connections—which dominated everyday life across Jakarta’s districts—then give way to speculation. They hedge their future possibilities on how well they are able to conduct themselves in a world where most of who they need to know in the long run they will never know directly. They must act as if they are all in the “same boat”, but without evidence of who they are exactly, they must speculate as to their commonality, and as such, the mega-development become a relatively “safe” venue through which such speculations can be made.

Characters-Part Three

Sun, 20 May 2012 09:19:44 -0400

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.